In his speech yesterday, Al Gore set a goal of achieving 100% carbon-free electricity by 2020. Jerome at The Oil Drum has some thoughts on whether or not this is realistic:
The short answer is: while 100% is probably unrealistic, it’s not unreasonable to expect to be able to get pretty close to that number (say, in the 50-90% range) in that timeframe, and it is very likely that it makes a LOT of sense economically.
The goal might be unrealistic, but I think it makes a lot of sense to set goals high. If we set the goal at 100% and achieve 60%, it’s a hell of a lot better than setting the goal at 60% and achieving 40%.
Read the post. It’s a little technical, and it’s a lot to get your head around, but it’s comprehensive and addresses three things:
1) is it technically feasible to build the requisite capacity within 12 years?
2) what will it cost, and what will it mean for power prices?
3) how can the intermittency issue be dealt with?
Update: Jack Cafferty asks:
Is Al Gore’s call for carbon-free electricity in 10 years doable or “ridiculous”?
Best comment:
J, Maryland July 18th, 2008 2:15 pm ET: Ridiculous! Lets not even try…
rawshark
“We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.”
eastriver
Putting the earth on Atkins. Cool.
We got our reunion in 2020 and we are going to be looking H-O-T, baby.
The Moar You Know
I don’t think it’s realistic but it’s a good goal to shoot for. I don’t think we’re going to get to where we need to go without a LOT more nuclear power, and that has some political issues that need to be dealt with.
But it can be done. I should have my conversion to run all the lighting in my house off solar done by next year – CFLs make this possible (the power drain is too great with standard incandescents). I’d like to go all solar but that will require a fight with my condo HOA that I’m not sure I want to get into.
Atlliberal
It is entirely realistic. The cost is less over 30 years than what we’ve spent on Iraq in the last 5 years. The technology is available now. It’s a win win for everybody. New jobs, more security, less pollution.
The only question is:
Are we, as a country, able to be bold enough to do it?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Gore sets goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2020?
Shouldn’t that be, “Gore sets a general time horizon of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2020?”
El Cid
Did no one think of this?
eglenn
Intermittency can be averaged out by Flywheel Storage. Vast arrays of rotating wheels (maybe underground underneath the solar and wind farms?).
BFR
It’s not politically possible – I think there are a number of newer coal-fired plants that have been constructed. There will be lots of political pressure to keep them open in order to realize some of the benefits initially planned.
The Oil Drum guesstimated I think that 50-75% or something like that was feasible.
w vincentz
Gore has shown vision.
Wind is certainly a good source. So are tidal, geothermal, and other renewables.
I’ll also add that methane production from sewage (presently flushed into the oceans by many US cities) should also be considered.
Punchy
Not feasible. Oil companies will never let it happen.
DragonScholar
I figure aim high, do what you can, and do as much as you can. If we don’t make it by the self-imposed deadline, we keep trying afterwards to get there. As a Project Manager, trust me, estimates and deadlines are flexible.
I think one thing this brings up is perhaps it’s best to phrase alternate energy as a CHALLENGE to get more people on board. Present it as a tough, intelligent, choice, gussy it up in some macho-esque language, and turn it back on people who think ecological awareness is wimpy.
“Are you MAN enough to use alternate energy?”
“Do you WANT to be the SLAVE of big energy companies?”
“FOREIGN oil powers have EMASCULATED us and it’s time to stop letting them do it”
“You’re saying Americans are too WIMPY and STUPID to make the change to alternate energy?”
Etc.
I exaggerate – but only slightly.
Person of Choler
Mr. Gore has finally slipped the surly bonds of reason that once tethered his imagination to physical reality.
RSA
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
SpotWeld
Reviewing Al Gore’s previous work (specifically “An Inconvenient Truth”) I have to admit he is not above using hyperbole to underscore his message.
And I’m not trying to re-hash the whole “Al Gore is a liah, Rant, Rant” screed. I only point out that he is “selling something” and that he may me making a somewhat exaggerated message in order to raise its profile to the point where it gets a much wider distribution.
So, I do think that it is an unrealistic goal. But I also think that it is incredibly worthwhile and beneficial to work towards it!
When a person trains for a marathon, they train with the ultimate goal to win that marathon. (i.e. You don’t train to be “second best”) But in all honesty, when starting out they will celebrate the very realistic and worthwhile milestone of just having that ability to finish a marathon.
Eh?
calipygian
Oil companies have to be co-opted. Something like special tax breaks for carbon intensive energy companies that allow for tax free investment in solar (both panel and concentrated heating), tidal, geothermal and wind power. I dont care WHO provides the carbon free power, someone has to. And if its Exxon-Mobil, at least we’re getting something back for the money we surrender to them.
Notorious P.A.T.
Yes.
It will cost a lot. Probably not more than continuing to grind our boot into Iraq’s face, though. And god knows what oil prices will be in 12 years.
Like we don’t have intermittent power now. A squirrel chews on a wire and half the Eastern seaboard gets shorted out; a hurricane knocks out half our refineries; a sultan on the other side of the world gets mad at the modernized nations and orchestrates an embargo; etc.
There are plenty of ways to store energy: Batteries, water towers, hydrogen production, heat sinks. etc. Personally I’d rather be building stuff like that than setting Arab children on fire.
Andrew
Oil companies have very little to do with power generated for electricity. That comes from coal, nuclear, and natural gas.
Notorious P.A.T.
If I were president I’d sit them down and say “Congratulations, you are now in the plastics business.” We will always need oil; the question is will we burn it for temporary energy, killing our environment in the process? Or will we use it for sustainable purposes?
Perry Como
I sometimes wonder how the US would be different if the Supreme Court would have gone the other way in 2000.
Zifnab
Yes, but that requires more overhead and infrastructure. Currently, we have plenty of capacity in traditional power sources to fill in the gaps left by wind. This is hardly the system-debilitating bug people make it out to be. Building new wind farms won’t make old oil, gas, and nuclear plants go up in puffs of smoke.
Electricity? From gusts of wind? Poppycock! Next you’ll be prattling on about those new-fangled horseless carriages! Hrmph. I’ll thank you for your time and see you aboard my personal Zeplin. Helium. Wave of the future, what what.
I think T. Boone Pickings would argue that you very much can make a killing in the wind power business, even in the face of Big Oil and Big Coal. Mining and drilling is god-awful expensive. And standing too close to Exxon is a bit of a political liability with gas prices this high. I don’t suspect for a second that the existing energy companies won’t put up a fight, but they’ve never been on shakier political footing that today.
charles
Well, alternatively we could just adopt Bush’s goal of 200% carbon-based electricity forever. How’s that for realistic.
The Moar You Know
Damn right, this is how we sold the moon program and how we made it work. Here’s how you deal with the doubters:
I guess you love sucking terrorist dicks. Say hi to Osama’s nutsack next time you’re down there.
Nick
$3.5 trillion to electrify the homes in the U.S.–the low end of Stieglitz’s estimate of the cost of the Iraq War.
110,000,000 American homes multiplied by $35,000 (the cost of providing solar electricity for the wattage of the average American home, without factoring in the lowering of costs of production because of scale).
Since we can’t get a refund on the Iraq war, it will require the American public to contribute about 5 hours of work a week for the next 10 years, in work or funds.
To the extent they are fair minded, the folks who supported the clusterfuck that is the Iraq war should pay the share of those of us who opposed it.
Jake
Concerning the US achieving energy independence, the big challenges are political, not technical. We have way too many short-sighted people in Congress.
When you think where this country would be had we spent one tenth what we’ve spent in Iraq on energy infrastructure, it’s worth crying. And yet, the political will simply isn’t there to approve that level of funding. It’s a fucking tragedy, in an epic fail kind of way.
w vincentz
On the topic of intermittency, there exists the potential of utilizing “pumped storage” facilities, especially in mountainous locales. An example is a NYSEG hydro project near where I live in the Catskills. The Minekill/Brown Mountain hydro project on the Schoharie Creek in Blenheim, NY is an excellent example. Basically, water is pumped up to a large reservoir on top of Brown Mountain during night hours (the fossil fuel power plants don’t shut off at night). During the day, the water is released from the reservoir and the pumps that pushed the water up the mountain spin as turbines that turn generators. The entire project is quite impressive and funtions as a huge “water battery”. The cost of the project was paid off ahead of schedule, since purchase of kw’s in off peak hours and feeding them back to the grid during peak hours proves the feasability of this endeavor.
DBrown
His goal is not realistic.
Ending coal/oil power plants in tens years? Look, I’m for a national effort but pie in the sky when people are struggling to pay for food and keep jobs (must less finding good paying ones after they are layed off), and keeping a roof over their heads is reality – using solar, wind and hot air from people claiming that this is possible, won’t cut it.
Gore had a chance to make a difference – when he won the 2000 electron he should have had the balls to fight those sick parasites and maybe have prevented much of this mess but he didn’t and he should do what he is good at – explain facts and the threats to the masses.
Maybe thermonuclear fusion could do it (if developed, these could provide 1000 MW plants, and produce zero CO2 emissions) but that would take a national effort and be a ten-year program, with luck, to build a proto-type plant
I work in that field and know what has been done, the problems. Issues are not serious for inertia based drive systems but technical problems can always bite any project on scale up. A solid proposal, with complete design (based on existing, working system), with realistic costs (under $400 billion) was submitted to DOE; a panel of experts (including international ones)in the field reviewed the proposal and agreed the system would have a very high chance to achieve all goals but funds were not available, so their was no point in advancing the program.
Those of you who are greater experts in the field then these people, and have read the other experts who do not and have never worked in this field can argue all these facts but I will not waste my time defending these issues.
My point is, if this project is too expensive to fund, where in god’s name will the money come for Gore’s vision?
EarBucket
I heard a guy from the American Enterprise Institute interviewed on (I think) the BBC World Service last night. He scoffed at the idea, saying “It doesn’t make any sense to shoot for the moon. It’s unrealistic.”
In my head, I heard JFK: ““We choose to not go to the moon! We choose to not go to the moon in this decade and not to do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard!”
vg
Jerome a Paris… ugh…
montysano
I like it, I like it. Let’s run it up the flagpole.
Also: maybe we can haz new preznit, one who doesn’t find it “presumptuous” to ask citizens to practice conservation. What a completely useless shitheel he is.
Wind power has huge potential, as does concentrated solar. Looks like some MIT student have the right idea: a solar concentrator and turbine for your backyard!
Notorious P.A.T.
What two countries do you suppose lead the world in wind power capacity? You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn the leader is Germany. In second place: the United States. Not only that, in 2006 Germany outproduced us by 9,000 megawatts, but in 2007 we closed the gap to less than 6,000 megawatts. (info)
It’s not hard to see why: US Wind Power Map Large portions of the US are well-suited for wind power, from places that need heating like Maine to places that need cooling like southern California, from plains to mountains.
Note that 8 of the 10 most populated metropolitan centers (encompassing roughly 1/5 America’s population) are within 100 miles of areas with wind activity as high as anywhere in the country. By comparison, virtually all of New York City’s drinking water is imported from at least 80 miles away, and Los Angeles brings in water from over 400 miles distant.info
Person of Choler
Well, Moar, leave aside for a moment your carnal fantasies and crank up your technical and economic genius and help me out with the following thought experiment: we wish to replace only the electricity generated from coal within Gore’s time frame. Here are some basic numbers (from the EEI website)
Total US Generation in 2007: 4,159,514 gigawatthours (I know that you know what a gigawatthour is so I need not explain it).
Fraction of that generated from coal: 48.6% (I know that you are smart enough to figure out how many gWh this amounts to).
How many wind farms or other forms of renewable energy will be necessary to cover this amount of generation?
Where would these facilities be sited?
What changes to the various parts of the high voltage transmission grid will be necessary to move the energy from the generation sites to the load centers where the electricity is consumed?
What will all this cost? On what do you base your figures?
Who will pay the cost?
If curtailing consumption is part of your plan, who will be curtailed and how will you make them cut back their consumption.
Let’s see if you are capable of rational technical and economic discussion, or can only write filthy wisecracks.
Best wishes et c.
Alan
I’d rather be gasoline free by 2020 (if not sooner). I think it’s in our greater national interest to defund middle eastern countries that funnel money to terrorism than not utilizing coal to power our electric automobiles. I’m all for generating power with wind and solar to augment nuclear power. But coal is the stepping stone to get there. IM(not so informed)O.
tom.a
Nor will it be for a couple years. Obama is more intent on changing the healthcare system in his first term. Republicans will immediately find their conservative conscience on spending and will scream BIG SPENDERS every time a Democrat opens his mouth which I think will play well since the nation appears very ready to slow down the rate the gov’t spends money. I’d love for Obama to take on both healthcare and climate change in his first term but the money for both won’t be there and without immediate results to show, healthcare will trump climate change.
Xenos
As for the intermittency issue, the larger and more efficient the continent-ranging power grid is, the less of a liability it would be. No wind? Excess solar capacity in the Southwest or Mexico can pick up the slack. Likewise, Canadian hydro can be stepped up as needed, as can gas, coal, and nuclear capacity.
If there is ever a usable superconducter technology, that will help tremendously… maybe that is the critical technological hurdle that needs to be jumped, that and some sort of electricity –> fuel power system to replace petroleum as the stuff burning in car engines.
The barely hidden political issue is who is going to run the Manhattan project X 10 to-the-power-of-? ? It ain’t gonna be private industry.
James F. Elliott
This kind of thing needs to be framed in a national security way, by which I don’t mean “freedom from foreign oil.” By using more solar panels on buildings, solar farms, wind farms, geothermal plants, methane conversion, etc., we create the ability to have community-based microgrid utility districts. Fewer cascading power failures lead to an economy and modern society less vulnerable to systems disruption and more resilient in the face of natural and man-made disasters. Not only will utility rates be cheaper — the more local the grid, the lower the distribution costs — but the secondary economic effects of power outages and fuel shortages will be mitigated against as well.
Emma Anne
1) Either no 9-11 or much reduced. A Gore administration would have caught at least some of these guys
2) No Iraq war, even if I’m wrong on (1)
3) Much more alternative energy infrastructure, meaning oil isn’t at $140/barrel
But on the downside:
4) Conservatives have spent the last seven years trying to bring the system to a halt. Every single appointment has to run the gauntlet, including judges at all levels. At least one impeachment attempt. Increased right-wing terrorism of the McVey sort and compounds of the Waco sort. Since oil isn’t $140, much disgust and contempt for the idea of alternative energy. Many righties buying Hummers just to spite liberals.
flavortext
It’s probably going to take a lot longer than 2020. IMHO, electric cars will be taking off right about then and suddenly the nation’s power grid is going to have to pump out a hell of a lot more electricity. 50% is pretty reasonable, but if I’m right about electric cars we won’t be shutting down any of the old fossil-fuel-burning power plants because we’ll need them just to keep up with demand. Overall though that would lead to a reduction in carbon emissions due to gasoline and diesel-burning cars being taken off the road. And once we have the power capacity to sustain that kind of demand, we can replace the old power plants and go green but I’d estimate that wouldn’t happen by at least 2030. Of course if the will to implement this kind of program on an Apollo or New Deal scale suddenly came into existence I don’t doubt that 12 years is enough (look what we did in WWII).
Oh and I agree with DragonScholar that Gore had to phrase this in the way he did. Americans are notorious for working hard…and for being very reluctant to invest in infrastructure. Not sexy enough I guess.
Notorious P.A.T.
The answer is: we already know enough about solar and wind power to use it for most of our needs. It is literally decades, if not centuries, ahead of fusion power in terms of development.
People are struggling, no doubt. But building (and maintaining) these clean energy systems would provide thousands of jobs. And once people are freed from having to help the king of Saudi Arabia buy a new yacht every time they turn their thermostat up they will find it easier to buy food.
Dreggas
O/T but looks like elections were stolen after all
Kevin
Hilarious, from someone whose very first post in this thread was a smart-assed insult.
Notorious P.A.T.
Remember: when you have a coal-fired power plant you buy coal, then burn it, then buy more coal, then burn it, then buy more coal, then burn it, then buy more coal, then burn it, then buy more coal, then burn it, then buy more coal, then burn it, then buy more coal, then burn it, then buy more coal, then burn it.
When you build a wind turbine or a solar collector, you turn it on and watch it generate power. Sure, someone needs to keep an eye on it in case something cracks, but other than that once the capital cost is paid you simply sit back and wait for it to recover itself.
Paul L.
The environmentalists/NIMBYs will block all of the following:
Nuclear : Possible Meltdown – Radioactive waste.
Wind and Solar : Uses too much land – Destroys habitats.
Hydro : Damming rivers destroys habitats.
But Al Gore shall lead the way!!!!
The Moar You Know
How’s your best friend, Hugo Chavez? How’s he doing? Hear he’s got a lot of money these days. He paying you enough?
I’m worried about that cause you’re working mighty hard for him. Doing research, working the numbers, writing arguments and counter-arguments – the whole nine yards!
I’ll bet he’s proud to have a guy like you on his side.
Too bad you can’t make white flags out of oil, you probably go through a lot of those.
Notorious P.A.T.
Are you freaking kidding me?
montysano
Person of Choler said:
Maybe we could trim that usage a wee bit? The USA is mindlessly profligate in our use/waste of energy.
Oh, I forgot: Al Gore is proposing this. Everyone knows that listening to anything Al says is just plain lunacy.
Person of Choler
Hi, Kevin. A wisecrack, yes, but not filthy.
Can you, or anyone, help MOAR answer my questions, quantitatively and logically?
Best regards, et c.
Dreggas
More here
The Moar You Know
Awesome, the second terrorist-fellater showed up! How are you, Paul? How’s that crap epilepsy-inducing website of yours doing? Plenty of hits from your takfir pals, no doubt.
So what’s up? How’s the old kneepad collection doing? Paychecks from King Abdullah coming through on time?
Sure hope so, you’re working your ass off for him.
Notorious P.A.T.
Hey everybody, Al Gore didn’t ride a bike across Washington DC! That means we’ll never run out of coal, and the money we spend on Arab oil never goes to terrorists, and the rising price of gasoline isn’t going to hurt our economy, and our money would be better spent blowing the heads off Iraqi children instead of researching alternative energy! Right, Paul L? That’s how it works, isn’t it?
Person of Choler
Montysano:
How much is a “wee bit”. How much is “mindlessly profilate”? What do we have to cut to get to just “profligate”? Who does the trimming? What do they trim? How do you make them do it?
Quantities, please.
cyntax
Incentives are often a good place to start:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4PRN/is_2008_April_21/ai_n25339378
Person of Choler
Yeah, I know. I misspelled “profligate”.
Notorious P.A.T.
Well, for instance:
Energy Star
This really isn’t that hard, Person of Choler.
Zifnab
Dude. Try the link in John’s post at the top of the page. This basically answers all your questions.
I’m not blown away by the fact that a wingnut gets into a huff over not having answers to questions that are clearly spelled out in the thread he is currently posting in. I am blown away that said wingnuts managed to stumble their way onto the internets to begin with.
“A network of servers and systems spanning the entire world? Ridiculous? Where would we find all the necessary wiring? Who’s going to lay the groundwork? What are the costs? How will it handle expanding loads of users?
Internets indeed! I’ll believe it when I see it!”
montysano
WTF, do you want a physics/engineering dissertation from us? This is a blog; we sit around here and crack wise.
Go do some research. The Oil Drum is an excellent place to start.
An article there said that an area 150 mi x 150 mi filled with solar concentrators could provide electricity for the world, including electric.
So: it’s big, it’s expensive, and like universal health care in the USA, is obvously beyond the bounds of human possibility.
cyntax
LOL
jamey
But Gore’s fat, and his house uses electricity. And Obama’s a Muslim. A MUSLIM!
montysano
LOL again.
See, Choler, this is what we do best around here.
Xenos
Bradblog?
A private litigant is trying to get discovery on the RNC?
An interesting way to waste money – what is this, the modern version of Brewster’s Millions? Unless they get a judge with a penchant for tilting at windmills and nothing else on his docket, this is all going nowhere, regardless of the validity of the case.
Svensker
We may get an automatic boost to greater energy efficiency with lower demand:
See this wonderful Op-Ed
mrmobi
In general, I agree with you, but nuclear has a major difficulty which everyone is ignoring, and that is, it’s too fucking expensive. Once produced, the energy is much more expensive than that produced from other sources.
Even if we manage to solve the problem of where to store the waste for a thousand years, it’s not possible to get to building a hundred new nuclear power plants (as McCain has proposed) without massively (read irresponsibly) co-opting the safety requirements in an effort to shorten the construction time (McCain is completely on board with that also). I’m also not even mentioning here that the nuclear power industry exists because our government has given the industry a “get out of jail free” card in the form of a law which limits liability in the case of an accident to $10,000 per death caused. Big surprise, huh? Now they want to relax those safety requirements, because they already know their liability is limited in the event of a disaster.
Now, imagine for a moment that a reactor design was available which operated at lower power, could be built incrementally, did not require massive amounts of water for cooling, was substantially more efficient in its’ usage of uranium to the point where existing supplies might last 300 years, as opposed to the currently predicted 100 years and was incapable of having a “melt-down.”
Well Juicers, it’s called a Pebble bed reactor.
I used to be a wild-eyed anti-nuclear activist (so you can blame me for our current dilemma, I guess) but the problem with nuclear has always been one of unreasonable expectations. Some of you might remember a time when our government said that nuclear power would be “so inexpensive to produce that it might be free.” That’s worked out well, huh?
These days, it’s becoming clear that nuclear is going to be a critical component in any long-term switch from carbon based fuels.
There is an excellent essay over at the Center for American Progress which details the excess costs of producing energy with nuclear reactors, and a whole lot more. Here is a snippet:
Please note that last paragraph. I wonder how much money McCain gets from the power generation industry? Might be worth a look.
Read the whole PDF, it’s worth your time.
cyntax
In all fairness to Choler, the questions aren’t bad per se, but throwing out a laundry list of them sure feels like a rhetorical technique intended to bury the opposing view in an avalanche of details; instead of engaging in an actual discussion.
And of course: always click the link.
w vincentz
For those that think siting windfarms on land is not the way to go, how about floating the wind tubines on the ocean?
Transmission lines could travel the seabed and deliver the electrical energy to nearby coastal cities.
Oh, gee, I almost forgot…there isn’t that much wind blowing across the ocean. That’s exactly why sailboats didn’t work out too well.
Person of Choler
Zifnab, first of all, when someone addresses others as “Dude”, I think it is the sort of person who is taking a short break from twiddling his xbox, or whatever it is that people who address others as “Dude” twiddle. I could be wrong, however.
Regarding the reference at the top of the post: there are some numbers there and some assumptions. My questions remain grounded in physical reality: what resources (material, technical, managerial, financial) are actually available to do this massive amount of work? What will all this actually cost? No bids are in yet. Check on the current and expected costs of modifying old or constructing new energy infrastructure and get back to me.
To those who think this problem is analagous to getting someone to the moon or the manhattan project: those were sophisticated science and engineering projects, but did not involve rewiring and repowering the whole USA.
The internet is another analogy that does not apply here: Fiber optics and server farms are not the same thing as high voltage transmission lines and power plants. Just take a look at one of each and, again, get back to me.
Best regards et c.
cyntax
Or a wind/solar combo for days when the wind isn’t up but the sun is out; help to keep our asset/network utlization up.
Person of Choler
cyntax,
Unfortunately, this avalanche of questions must be answered not only verbally, but with steel, copper, concrete, engineering and construction expertise, right-of-way acquisition, finance and taxation, utility rates, old power plant decommissioning, labor dislocations and so forth. These questions ought to be carefully considered up front before any “Great Leaps Forward” are mandated by government fiat.
jamey
Person of Choler translated:
Yes, it will be difficult, expensive, and require sacrifices on many levels. People hate change, so let’s not do it.
The Moar You Know
You’re a traitor, plain and simple.
jamey
Montysano:
Imagine if we could find a way to turn snark and mild ridicule into wattage. Balloon Juice would be like ANWR, only with less cute animals.
cyntax
True your questions are based on reality, but I’m skeptical that they are based on sound process. For any given project of any complexity it’s always possible at the start of the project to jump far enough down the timeline and far enough into the details that no one will be able to answer your questions adequately.
Why don’t you shoulder some of the intellectual lifting here and explain why every point you’ve brought up needs to be addressed prior to getting started. Also what do your objections really amount to? Are you saying that because we (on this blog) don’t have the answers to your questions we shouldn’t do this at all, or are you saying something else? Further, if we don’t do this what’s your idea about getting out of this mess?
More to the point, what are the costs of not doing it?
cyntax
And what makes you think they won’t be?
Zifnab
You would be, but please continue.
Search for “the economics of such a plan” section, and you’ll notice that while he doesn’t crunch numbers directly he does compare the economic viability of wind farms to their coal, gas, and nuclear counterparts.
Wind farms have already proven themselves to be economically viable. Wind energy costs are currently on par with fossil fuel equivalents. Jerome spells out the problem with a production model whose costs are almost entirely fixed, (you can always run a coal plant at half capacity by burning less coal, but wind farms don’t have that luxury) noting how the income stream for a large wind farm needs to be stabilized.
However, he address the price of existing fossil plants when compared to wind farm counterparts in the piece that you clearly did not read in full.
Blah blah. Hard things are hard. Blah blah its not the same for other projects. I’ve got a sister in high school who pitches this exact same fit when she gets a bad test score back. Really, the whine-factor here is enormous and the ignorance is rather staggering.
Are you honestly claiming that laying down fiber wire is so substantially different than laying down electrical cables that wiring the country for internet access would be substantially different from balancing out the electrical grid? Are you claiming that splitting the atom to make a bomb is such a different flavor of hard that a like-minded school of intellectual savants – when put to the challenge – couldn’t come up with a solution? I’m not sure what your argument is beyond shouting to the wind that its too hard and you’d rather keep nut-gobbling the Saudi Princes than even attempt to change how we manage electricity.
My god, I’m grateful that people like you weren’t around when they invented the automobile, or we’d hear you screaming to the four winds at how utterly impractical it would be to create a national highway system. Heaven forbid you had taken a job at the Department of the Interior when they were developing the Hoover Dam. We’d never hear the end of all the impossible things America shouldn’t attempt.
Atlliberal
For all of you who doubt that this can be done:
On your drive home from work today, take notice of all of the commercial buildings you pass by. Look at their roofs, visible throushout the day because there is not a tree in sight. Look at the malls, strip malls, office buildings, warehouses, not to mention the right of ways for the power lines. If you are wondering where we could put enough solar panels for the whole country, use your imagination. look at the entire midwest, look at your own house. Now imagine all of them connected to the grid…
DR
Here are Canada’s numbers:
http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11-621-MIE/2007062/tables/table4.htm
Canada-wide, Hydro-electricity accounts for nearly 60% of electricity generation (96.4% in Quebec, 98.8% in Manitoba).
We can do it, but America can’t?? WOW: AMERICA IS NOT NUMBER ONE! OMG!!!
Zifnab
Ah. I see what you’re doing here. The devil is in the details. I come from an entire family of engineers, and they’ll all happily tell you how providing the specs on a single project will take weeks or months. So PoC is trying to raise the bar. He wants all the specs for all the projects, up front and accounted for, and when he receives them he wants hours to pick them over for flaws and problems so that he can send you back to do it all again.
I’ve heard of this happening before, and its a technique generally utilized by a manager who just wants to kill a project, but doesn’t have the clout or muscle to stomp it out.
PoC is throwing up a great number of obstacles under the assumption that this is a progressive game and there is no penalty for simply remaining at the status quo.
The whole reason we’re even considering wind farms over coal plants stems from the mess that coal plants create. PoC’s default alternative – endlessly mining fossil fuels – allows the perfect to be the enemy of the good so that we’ll be left with the crap. The end game is to set the bar so high for alternative energy – and so low for expensive, low-return, messy, archaic methods like strip mining and off-shore drilling – that people just toss up their hands and surrender because building a wind farm is far, far, far, far more difficult than building a coal power plant.
So, I guess the real question is how much stock PoC has in coal, and how much of a loss he stands to take when wind energy takes off in his face.
Dennis - SGMM
The gist of the article seems to be that it can be done and that it will cost a lot of money.
Seems to me that we’re spending close to a trillion a year on a defense establishment whose main purpose is to ensure our ability to spend hundreds of billions a year on imported oil. A military whose main mission was defending the US would likely cost a lot less than one geared to fight everyone else in the world for a finite resource. Moreover, what would our foreign policy look like absent the need to feed our oil dependence? My guess is that the ME would suddenly become just about as important to us as sub-Saharan Africa is now.
We really don’t make many things here any more. We make weapons, deals, and ugly cars that no one wants. It might be nice to put Americans to work building things and making things that people want and need. Who knows, it might even stimulate the economy.
Or, we can sit on our hands and see who gets to be the one who beats his neighbor to death for the privilege of roasting the last dog over the embers of the last burning building.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“What will all this actually cost?”
About $50-60/tonne CO2 for NGCC w/ carbon capture and sequestration, less for oxyfuel/IGCC.
Total between 0.5-2% of GDP, or $60-240 trillion/year. Compare with Stiglitz’s estimate of $3 trillion total cost for the Iraq war, and it looks pretty cheap.
Google Hertzog, MIT, and carbon management if you want more. Hertzog at MIT is the expert on costs of CO2 mitigation. Or read the AR4 report on mitigation at http://www.ipcc.ch.
That is, if you weren’t just concern trolling.
cyntax
The more heads we have in the sand, the sooner we’ll find that next big oil field!
Dennis - SGMM
The Boeing 747 is a fairly ubiquitous aircraft. There are 171 miles of wire and six million individual parts (Half of them fasteners) in every 747. How can six million parts be correctly assembled? Who in the world can correctly route and connect 171 miles of wire inside an aircraft? Obviously it can’t be built.
capelza
Person of Choler..think outside the grid. If homes in the sunny (and heavily populated parts of the country that suck up so energy for AC alone) each had it’s own solar array and or small wind turbine, the grid would be much less critical.
As for aesthetics…that is a paradigm that can change.
Already said, but the AEI guy just cracks me up…hello, to the moon in 10 years. What a national adventure that was.
John S.
You better hide those because if the shit really hits the fan here, you’ll end up being our
51st* 52nd state.*My apologies to Puerto Rico. I know you don’t pay taxes or anything, but you DO get to have a say in our elections.
Martin
Of course it can be done – just finance and direct the program from the federal government with a willing administration. As it is now, it’s impossible because industry will never get the ROI that they want, and frankly, they don’t need to do this because coal is cheaper to get up and running and we’d have to pay them double in subsidies to play along.
But it’s not as simple as solar panels and wind turbines. Solar panels don’t work at night and wind turbines don’t work when it’s calm. Yes, they can cover most of the peak daytime needs and some of the evening needs, but we need some power generation that runs 24/7 to smooth things out. We need nukes. We have a bunch (along with some hydro and such), but we probably need more. They could be built by 2020 (barely) but industry would never put the money up. They’d need to be fully public. We could expand hydro as well. We have a lot of hydro opportunities going unused (not full dams like we’ve traditionally done but run-of-river).
But all of these things can be done in parallel which is why it’s feasible. They rely on different parts of the economy, different industries, and can be implemented depending on what each region can do. Toss in equally aggressive energy savings efforts and there’s no technical reason why it can’t be done.
Politically it’s a disaster, though. Coal, oil, and nat gas are pretty big lobbying groups. Environmentalists would actually freak out over this because they are so NIMBY-oriented. It’d take some brass ones from Congress and the WH to do it. There were no losers when we went to the moon. There would be this time. WV would quite simply lose it’s biggest industry and the senators from that state would be hard pressed to stand idly by. The pressure to bring benefits back to the regions that lose out would be enormous. It’d be an earmark bonanza.
Xenos
Um… American hydro resources per capita are much less than Canada’s. Then again, we have your frosty buts whipped when it comes to solar reserves.
As for putting together a national, political and economic movement for revamping our economy in order to bring it within humanistic standards, we generally don’t get a shot at that but once every 80 years (Lincoln, FDR, Obama ?), once we have exausted all the alternatives to doing the right thing.
OK, we are stupid that way. If we screw this up for another 80 years, we deserves 3rd world status.
(Goes back to checking ‘real estate for sale’ in the Nova Scotia Craigslist)
Napoleon
My understanding is that research into thermonuclear fusion has been the rare research project that the more work they do on the problem the more they think they are really far away from a solution. When I was a kid you would read predictions to the effect that in 40 years fusion plants would be everywhere and electricity would be practically free. Now you never even hear it floated by knowledgeable sources as even a plausible long-term contribution to the solution.
grendelkhan
Well said, sir. Well said.
If anyone here is interested in nuclear reactors, there are designs which extract far more energy from their fuel, are capable of recycling “spent” fuel from pressurized water reactors, and are fail-safe. The project was scrapped, but seems to be making a comeback under the DOE’s “Generation IV Reactor” program. (I wrote a summary in comments here.)
I mention this not because I’m advocating that these be built–it’s doubtful any will come online before 2030–but because nuclear isn’t inherently a bad option, and you don’t need to figure out fusion to have safe, clean nukes running. You just need to not have cancelled the program that had already built one back in 1994.
Xenos
We can’t do thermonuclear fusion without a supply of Helium-3. Maybe after another 100 years of space exploration and development we can come up with a way to do that. That is next century’s problem, when we need an order of magnitude more energy for whatever damn fool idea we next come up with.
Napoleon
I heard a program (Talk of the Nation?) 2 or 3 months ago where they talked of some proposals for solar power that would be on the gird, and they are not talking about using solar panels but things like mirror farms that point to a tower that has water pipes that would heat and drive a turbine, ect. The hot water can be stored and effectively used something like 24 hours to generate electricity, even in the absence of sun.
Punchy
Why the fuck does the Granite State so hate America?
I bet next week, they’ll approve of gay abortions by gay doctors married to gay people who send love notes to Castro and Chavez and Kim Jung Il and other gay stuff, including voting for
terroristsDemocratsKevinD
I work at Florida Power and Light, and the only thing they’re talking about is Wind and Solar. Most fossil fuel plants planned are the ones replacing old, inefficient plants. With the price of fuel going up, business will probably be way ahead of the government, which will be too tied down by status quo interests.
Dork
Lou Dobbs’ head just exploded.
Xenos
Maybe it was this old song that done it
VERSE 1
Now President Carter was a good ol’ boy, a Southerner through and through
But when he asked all Americans to sacrifice, he really meant you-know-who
He wants all our oil and our nuclear fuels
Now what does he take us for, silly fools?
The president wants us to pass our gas, now ain’t that a kick in the . . .
CHORUS
Freeze a Yankee, drive seventy-five and freeze ‘em alive
Freeze a Yankee, let your thermostat rise and give ‘em a surprise
Governor Briscoe promised us that if any [darn] Yankee [raised] a fuss
We’d turn off the gas, cut off the oil and let ‘em all freeze and boil
Person of Choler
Jaysus! Where to begin?
Zifnab: “Are you honestly claiming that laying down fiber wire is so substantially different than laying down electrical cables”?
I am indeed. Electric transmission and mid-level distribution cables operate at voltages from 13,800 volts up to 500,000 volts. This is much different from fiber optic cables which have no EMF in them at all. It is easy to bury fiber optics; quite a different matter to deal with high voltage lines.
w vincentz:
“Oh, gee, I almost forgot…there isn’t that much wind blowing across the ocean. That’s exactly why sailboats didn’t work out too well.”
Sail power in fact didn’t work out very well because the wind is very undependable and does not blow when you would like to use it, unlike steam and diesel power which operates when required. Hence the replacement of sail power by fossil fuel soon as technology allowed it. That’s why today’s world wide seaborne commerce is diesel powered and sailboats are the toys of folks who like to waste money going nowhere fast.
Sarcastro
What will all this actually cost?
And here we get to the very root of the problem: Capitalism.
All of this, and more, is perfectly within the capabilities of our technology and resources, but not within the capability of our economic system.
Man, no wonder supervillainous impulse to conquer the world is so damned tempting.
DougJ
Off topic, did you see this at TPM about McCain disclosing the timing of Obama’s possible trip to Iraq? It’s really pretty strange.
calipygian
God, the Bearded, Sandal-Wearing, Mary-Knocking-Up, Mother Fucking Father of the Son of Man can, that’s who.
Notorious P.A.T.
I knew I forgot something. My proposal for the Barack Hussein Obama Wind Power Plant:
Here’s the US wind map again. Map Lake Michigan is pretty dark and windy, isn’t it? That’s because it’s like one big wind tunnel. The west coast of Michigan is much higher than the surrounding land, funnelling wind south. We hear a lot of talk about building oil rigs in the water that, in ten years if we’re lucky, will give us a year or two worth of energy. Why not build wind turbines in Lake Michigan, that will give us energy now and forever?
Chicago is the country’s third largest metropolitan area, home to 9 1/2 million people. And there, just offshore, is a huge area of high wind activity.
Of course, we need some way to store energy for periods of low wind. Remember how high the west coast of Michigan is? that’s how we would do it. There’s already a pumped hydroelectric storage plant in Luddington, Michigan. link We could easily build more of these at various places along the coast. Trust me, we in Michigan need all the jobs we can get.
calipygian
God, the Bearded, Sandal-Wearing, Mary-Knocking-Up, Mother Fucking Father of the Son of Man can, that’s who.
Oh yeah, and Boeing, too.
PeterJ
McCain has become awfully desperate, but I sure hope he’s not become that desperate.
Zifnab
Why do we need more nuclear plants, or even hydro dams for that matter? We have an existing supply and no one is going to run around shutting them down just because a wind farm went up. The idea is to even out the difference in an alt-energy heavy grid. Why not just rely on the older existing infrastructure until we can find a Green method for filling in the gaps?
David Hunt
It doesn’t need to when you can run an ocean thermal system. Napoleon brought of the prospect of storing solar energy in heated water, but that is basic idea of OTEC. It effectively turns the ocean into your solar panel. And there’s always going to be a temperature differential between ocean depths, day or night. Jerry Pournelle was writing about this stuff 25 years ago. I think Brazil ran one of this things c40 years ago as pilot program.
Person of Choler
Dennis – SGMM Says:
“The Boeing 747 is a fairly ubiquitous aircraft. There are 171 miles of wire and six million individual parts (Half of them fasteners) in every 747. How can six million parts be correctly assembled? Who in the world can correctly route and connect 171 miles of wire inside an aircraft? Obviously it can’t be built.”
Ah, dear Dennis. During your education, were you not taught that argument from analogy is a risky way to advance a logical proof? Has it not occurred to you that reworking the high voltage electrical network of the entire USA might be a different proposition from assembling aircraft in a single building in Everett, Washington? It is a very large and impressive structure, but rather small compared to the continental USA.
Notorious P.A.T.
I think ships today are powered by fuel because they are so freaking big that sails would have to reach up into orbit to propel them by wind power.
Of course, no one is proposing turning our economy into a sailboat. For instance, sailboats can’t store extra wind for times of low wind activity. Our nation’s electrical grid can.
Zifnab
Well, shit. Then my computer must not work right now, because I could have sworn I was getting my electricity from tens – possibly hundreds – of miles away.
Can’t be done! Impossible!
DougJ
I wonder what he thought he was doing. Why did he even bring it up?
The Moar You Know
Because the conservatives in this country have decided that anything that has to do with energy that is not “moar of the same, plz” is worse than communism and faggotry combined. I said this above and I really mean it – you mean to tell me that the nation that pioneered powered flight, the atom bomb, lunar missions, penicillin, McDonalds, rock and roll and the NFL can’t figure out a way to get off oil?
Are the wingnuts serious?
The mind reels; this isn’t just possible, this is easy.
I don’t find counterarguments to the creation of “green” power offensive because I’m a Democrat – I find them offensive as an American. They imply that America is too stupid and slothful to solve our own problems.
Notorious P.A.T.
Here’s something on this topic that people here might be interested in: Island in the Wind
Briefly: in less than ten years, an island of conservative Danish farmers converted their community to green energy and now produce more than they use themselves.
w vincentz
@Person of Choler,
You obviously are a “nay sayer”. My guess is that you’d be just fine with energy production staying staus quo.
In my view, that’s quite shortsighted.
By placing floating wind turbines within proximity of large electricity producing cities, line loss through transmission lines would be lessened, global damage due to co2 emissions greatly reduced, and other consequential environmental damage from other energy production sources, such as acid rain, would no longer be a cause for concern.
Having spent many years on the Atlantic coast, though you seem to be much more informed than me, I’ll simply state that I can count the days on one hand when the wind speed offshore was less than five knots.
If the wind can push a clipper ship, it can turn a floating wind turbine (or a few hundred of them).
Dennis - SGMM
I wasn’t trying to advance a logical proof, thank you. I was satirizing the notion that because one person, or even several blog commenters, can’t answer all of the questions regarding a project that project must not be viable. Unless my PC is running on steam, I’d say that much of the high-voltage electrical network of the US is in place – it’s just that the various regions are not as interconnected as they would need to be to make renewable energy a viable addition to our generating capacity. That’s neither a small job nor a cheap one but, we did manage to build the current grid didn’t we? Lamentably, all of that effort will be worth dick if we can’t afford the fossil fuels to generate electricity. The costs of not doing anything, or of waiting for the perfect solution, will dwarf the cost of beginning this now.
Person of Choler
Zifnab Says:
“Well, shit. Then my computer must not work right now, because I could have sworn I was getting my electricity from tens – possibly hundreds – of miles away.”
Dear Old Zifnab, nobody disputes that the electrical grid as developed and refined in the USA for 120 years or so does in fact work. The question is, can we physically and financially make the massive changes in the generation and distribution of electricity to make Gore’s proposals work. I remain skeptical.
Notorious P.A.T.:
“For instance, sailboats can’t store extra wind for times of low wind activity. Our nation’s electrical grid can.”
And where will the grid store this energy in sufficient quantity to match the output of the likes of wind generation to the usage patterns of the population? Flywheels? Batteries and Inverters? Superconducting Induction Coils (surprised that nobody has mentioned this yet, unless I missed it)? Pumped hydro? Indeed these things exist. What do you think it will take to scale them up to handle the mismatches between Gore’s plans for generation sources and end user requirements?
I have no argument with the theory; my questions are all related to the economic and technical means of putting this stuff into use.
Notorious P.A.T.
Seriously: why do we need to rework the entire network? Sure, if we made everyone in the country move to one of the Dakotas we’d have to build a bunch of new power lines. But here we’re talking about building one kind of power plant instead of another and plugging it in. I honestly don’t see what the problem is.
Yes, my proposal for the Barack Hussein Obama Power Plant would require some new power lines. What, we don’t know how to build power lines? A hundred years ago we were stringing power cables under the ocean.
Zifnab
No no. You miss my meaning. The argument was that alt energy sources like wind and solar leave energy gaps during the day – periods of high demand but low supply. The proposed solution was building a bunch of new nuclear plants to fill those gaps.
I find this solution silly because we already have an existing power grid that has been meeting our needs for decades. No need to go off and build a bunch of new fossil/uranium fuel stations to plug gaps that would easily be filled by the existing infrastructure, just because the alt energy grid would have a few holes in it were we to use alt energy all by itself.
My point was that we should be moving away from non-renewable sources. Filling energy gaps with brand new plants that use old sources of energy makes me feel like we’re taking one step forward and two steps back.
w vincentz
oops…correction: energy consuming cities, not producing.
Zifnab
Who is making changes? We’re extending on existing infrastructure. The only question is whether we can balance the energy loads. Telephone switch boards have been dealing with load balancing for years. So have sewage treatment systems. What you claim to be so questionably possible we’ve been doing since before your grandparents were born.
You just need to take a few civil engineering classes to understand how your nation was actually built.
Person of Choler
Dennis – SGMM: we did indeed manage to build the present grid. It took about 120 years of trial and error leading to ever increasing technical sophistication in generation, transmission, distribution equipment, and network operation. The system exists, but that says nothing about the feasibility, economics, or timing of making massive revolutionary changes to it.
Notorious P.A.T.
All over the place. We can store energy anywhere.
Dennis - SGMM
How much of the original 120-year-old grid is in use today? Oh, none. You’re right though; there are so many questions about an undertaking of this scope that we shouldn’t do anything.
America says: “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
The Moar You Know
Zif: no, I got it. I’d prefer to see some new nuclear plants anyhow, just because it can help us knock the carbon load down faster – but you’re absolutely right. We could leave everything as is and just build green production as we need to expand the grid.
What offends me are the rightards who scream about anything solar, wind, biomass; all of it – they seem to think that any green-produced energy is the end-result of a deliberate collusion between Al Gore, Josef Stalin, Satan and the residents of San Francisco, and aimed at ruining the nation. And that offends me. We have always done the “impossible” in this nation and we surely can do it now. If I felt like taking out a $20,000 HELOC and taking on a fight with my condo association, I could have a completely off-the-grid solar home by next month. No downtime – 24/7 with all the comforts – and yet there are idiots posting here right now who insist that it can’t or shouldn’t be done on a national basis.
w vincentz
notorious P.A.T.,
Thanks for the Luddington link. That’s the way the Minekill
pumped-storage facility works as well. The only difference is that Minekill has four penstocks and Luddington has six.
If there were a few more pumped storage operations along some of the Great Lakes with floating wind turbine “farms”, sited outside shipping lanes, many cities in proximity would benefit.
Punchy
He just wanted to ensure Obama’d be met with candy and flowers. And maybe a stray grenade or twelve. Good with the bad and all that.
Person of Choler
Notorious P.A.T. Says:
“And where will the grid store this energy
All over the place. We can store energy anywhere.”
Yes, Notorious, this is indeed so. But the equipment to do the storing must be designed and built. And that takes time and resources. My skepticism of Gore’s proposal simply relates to “how much of both is needed and does this much exist in the real world.”
PeterJ
I understand that there are all these muslims that are going to kill us all. That might have something to do with it.
Perry Como
I don’t know about you moonbats and your “wind farms.” Where are the wind seeds going to come from? How long does it take the wind to grow? What’s the return on investment when you harvest the wind? Do you store the wind in wind silos? HAHAH SILLY LIBERALS!!1one!eleven
Xenos
Well, we could store energy by hoisting concern troll up the Brooklyn bridge…
montysano
No doubt. I could buy a lot in my neighborhood and build an earth-sheltered home, but the city wouldn’t allow it and no bank would touch it.
Martin
Storing electricity is hard. It’s much easier if the grid can respond to demand as much as possible. Some of that would come naturally. Peak demand is in the afternoon – when solar works very well. Overnight demand is typically lower when solar doesn’t work, but wind and everything else still works. So one way to tackle this is as follows:
Build solar to meet the difference from peak daytime to peak evening usage. Work that out by region (higher in hot regions where there is more AC usage, so more solar needed in the southwest, etc.) and build accordingly. Tailor energy reduction solutions not to reducing daytime peak if solar looks like it can scale up, instead focus on evening peak – light bulbs, etc. – so that you can minimize the amount of non-solar power needed.
That done, you have a more normalized power demand across the day. Then look at what you can count on wind to provide as it’s another intermittent solution and build that out by region.
Then look at hydro and geothermal opportunities and build them out. Then fill in with nuclear what can’t otherwise be done with other solutions.
The problem with electricity storage is that it’s expensive and inefficient. Batteries are getting better but you have two inversions to cover (AC -> DC -> AC) and you lose with each pass, as well as losing a steady amount over time. Running 12V or 18V DC in households might be a pretty good idea (since all electronics have an inverter anyway and could run straight) but that’s a major infrastructure change and would really only happen with new homes.
The best energy storage solutions we have are nuclear and large-hydroelectric. All that water behind the dam is potential energy waiting to be unleashed when demand needs it. But those large dams are damaging and shouldn’t be encouraged. Nuclear is truly energy-on-demand. They’re the least damaging taken as a whole.
Targeted conservation is probably the most important element needed. Our household is doing that in CA. When afternoon peak power demand looks like it’ll exceed supply for the day, we get a notice to reduce consumption during peak hours. Now, with no AC to start with, there’s not much we can do, but the TV goes off and we wait a few hours to vacuum and use other appliances. Right now, we don’t have periodic power – so the power companies want a nice flat power demand curve. With solar factoring in strong, you want the opposite – you want all the power demand during daylight hours. You want to encourage people to vaccum during the day, to run electric hot water heaters after sunrise, etc. And you want to spend your conservation dollars at night. It’s better to accept inefficiency during the day if that buys you lower-power lighting. Unfortunately, as a nation, we absolutely suck at conservation. It’s totally incompatible with having that giant TV and refrigerator in your outdoor barbecue (sitting in the sun, no less).
Svensker
Person of Choler Says:
Welp, we could all go shopping (good times) or stand around wringing our hands (bad times) and be where we are today, only worse off. Or we could start doing something and see how stuff works.
People didn’t seem to mind spending $3trillion in Iraq for a whole lot less than bupkis. Another few billion spent here or there for a trial attempt at actual U.S. infrastructure shouldn’t be too scary, should it? It might actually benefit U.S. citizens — what a fucking novel idea.
Person of Choler
Dennis – SGMM asks:
“How much of the original 120-year-old grid is in use today? Oh, none. You’re right though; there are so many questions about an undertaking of this scope that we shouldn’t do anything.”
Not so, virtually all of the rights of way are still in use. The technology has changed, but there are very few places served by electricity in 1888 that are unserved today. Many power stations dating decades back are still in use, although much modernized and repowered.
The point is that the US power system has been continuously upgraded by increments. A 10 or 12 year phase out and relocation of nearly half of the country’s generation capacity and consequent modification to the transmission system (e.g. energy storage to match unpredictable generation to predictable load requirements) is a different matter altogether.
Person of Choler
And now, I am tired. I live in a European time zone and it is time for me to knit up the ravelled sleeve of care.
It has been fun. I will check back tomorrow if I regain sentience.
Good night.
Dreggas
We could generate a lot of power by hooking Rush Limbaugh and most of the fox noise crew to generators while they run their mouth, now that’s wind-bag power.
Notorious P.A.T.
Given: we are going to build new power facilities this year and every year, as existing plants wear out and must go offline. Now, we can build more of the same and hope we find oil on the moon, and keep blowing mountains up to get at their coal, or we can build hydrogen production plants instead. We can build oil rigs offshore and hope the rise in sea levels caused by burning that oil doesn’t subsume those rigs, or we can build wind turbines offshore.
There is NOTHING difficult about this. Wind turbines *exist*. Solar power plants *exist*. All we need to do is build more of them.
Notorious P.A.T.
Give him some oxycontin and he’ll go all night.
w vincentz
@ Perry Como,
As a matter of fact, I can give you a very good deal on “wind seeds”. The price is very good for the quality of seeds you’ll get. They’ll come in an evelope marked “air”.
Put up your email address so I can talk more about it with you. You won’t be disappointed. I guarantee millions of wind seed molecules.
Do you have paypal?
PeterJ
Here’s an interesting take, McCain did it since he wanted Obama to cancel the trip to Iraq.
oh really
Or we could take the Bush/Republican approach: set the goal at 0.000000%, achieve 0.000005% (which would undoubtedly require tax incentives and new regulations to remove existing capacity), and declare a major victory/achievement.
The Moar You Know
My issue is thankfully nowhere near as severe; California law requires HOAs to allow solar. However, HOAs (and mine is no exception) seem to believe that the Constitution allows their interpretation of the rules to supercede state or federal law.
So really, it comes down to the money to buy the system, but I won’t do that until I can be assured of building it without a fight. When I serve on the board next year I anticipate it won’t be so much of a problem.
Dennis - SGMM
Just heard one of the bobbleheads on NPR’s “Left, Right and Center” make a good point: the Democratic House couldn’t even pass a mandate to have renewables comprise 15% of our generating capacity by 2020. So, good luck Al; your idea could lead to an American renaissance but we’ll probably never know because Congress is largely comprised of gutless place seekers.
Marcel F. Williams
Gore said that he wanted the US to provide all of our
electricity needs within the next 10 years through non-carbon dioxide
polluting systems by:
1. dramatically increasing solar energy production
2. dramatically increasing wind energy production
3. dramatically increasing geothermal
4. the utilization of clean coal
5. while keep nuclear energy production at its current level (20% of
electric power generation in the US)
I don’t know, but Gore may be as dumb as McCain on his knowledge on
the energy requirements of this country.
1. Solar power currently represents just 0.1% of our total electricity
production. So even if you increased solar power capacity by– 10
times– current capacity over the next decade, solar would still only
produce about 1% of our nations total electricity.
2. Wind currently produces close to 1% of our total electricity
production. So if you increased wind capacity about 10 times over the
next decade, wind would still only produce about 10% of our total
electricity needs.
3. Geothermal produces about 0.3% of our total electricity production.
If you could somehow increase that by 10 times over a decade, that
would represent about 3% of our total electricity needs.
So non-hydroelectric renewables (solar, wind, and geothermal) would
only produce about 14% of our total electricity needs if we
dramatically increased current production by a enormous factor of ten
times current capacity within ten years. Add hydroelectric to that and
21% of our electricity could be produced by renewable energy. This of
course assumes that there will be no significant increase in
electricity demand due to increasing population and economic growth.
Clean coal? Coal produces 100 times as much radioactive waste as
nuclear power per unit of electricity produced and thousands of times
more toxic waste. Trying to capture the carbon dioxide from these
plants will raise electricity prices from coal– dramatically. And
there is no long term environmentally sound place to put the carbon
dioxide after its captured. Clean coal is a total myth.
Just increasing nuclear capacity by less than– 5 times– current
capacity could supply all of our electricity needs plus the off-peak
electricity from nuclear could be used to produce hydrocarbon fuels
that could cut our oil imports by at least 50% . But even I wouldn’t
say that this could be done in a mere decade. Additionally, replacing
all of our electricity through carbon neutral systems would only solve
about 40% of our total energy needs.
Both Gore and McCain need to look at the real numbers. This energy and
climate change problem is going to optimistically take at least 30 or
40 years to resolve.
Marcel F. Williams
Xenos
This topic is like honey for the concern trolls.
Just can’t be done, just too expensive, just too complicated, just too hard.
How about what happens if we don’t try? Let’s just take another 20 year nap, and see where that gets us?
Dennis - SGMM
I’m not opposed to nuclear. I am more in favor of wind power. Nuclear requires some very heavy-duty fabrication and manufacturing (I machined pressure vessels and high pressure valves for nuke boats) that uses numbers of experienced, highly trained machinists, welders, inspectors, etc., as well as some massive (And expensive) machinery. America pretty much stopped doing this kind of work ten years ago so the pool of trained people has aged out or moved into other things. Nuclear also requires a cadre of intensively trained technicians for maintenance at every site. Wind power, on the other hand, is comparatively low tech from a manufacturing and maintenance standpoint. I believe that it would be easier and quicker by several orders of magnitude to ramp up production for wind power than it would for nuclear.
dbrown
Breeding of Helium-3 can be done a number of ways. Current methods use fission reactors. One untried but trivial method would be to use linear accelerators (A method proposed under the puppet king, bush, by the way.)
Space is not a good place to get He-3; rather expensive going to the moon and refining moon dust.
Please check your facts before making posts on subjects that you have not researched.
dbrown
Forgot to mean one thing in my post, He-3 is not used for fusion; rather deuterium and tritium are used. Again, please check your facts.
Bob In Pacifica
Punchy’s early observation points to the biggest problem. It’s not necessarily the science or people’s will to get off the oil habit.
Big Oil has been a big part of the permanent government since the turn of the last century. After WWI the Dulleses were all over the Middle East cutting deals for crude. It was no mystery that America’s post-WWII worldwide power expansion was watched over and guided by the Dulleses. Just as the OSS was filled with Wall Streeters who kept in touch with their investments (FDR kept an eye on OSS man Nelson Rockefeller and his South American fascist friends during the war), the CIA could be seen as an international Pinkerton Agency, beating up the enemies of American corporate wealth, much of which involved oil.
Although it may seem incredible for us down here among the hoi polloi, there is a connection between things such as the FISA enhancements, something the intelligence community wants, and the constant battling against sensible energy policies. The FISA capitulation is a measure of the strength of the permanent government versus political parties or political figures, who are easily cowed or removed.
+++
In the early 1990s in the SF Bay Area there was an ongoing but mostly submerged scandal about a spying operation run by the ADL. It spied on anti-Semitic hate groups like the Aryan Nation types. Understandable. And it spied on groups associated with Islamic political movements. Also understandable.
But what was most insightful was that it spied on lots of what would be considered mainstream and leftist targets with no discernable animus against Jews: bookstores, public television stations, unions, student groups. Politicians from Pete McCloskey to Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer were spied on. The two main men in the spying operation were an FBI informant and a San Francisco cop who worked part-time for the CIA in Latin America and North Africa. His police locker had a box of pictures of people of the world blindfolded and tied to chairs. His souvenirs.
The ACLU investigated and said that the operation appeared to be a domestic spying operation growing out of a joint federal ops started for the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. When the courts ruled that the spying in that operation was too overly broad to be constitutional there apparently was a transfer to a friendly non-government entity, the ADL, which continued the spying, at much expense. What was the quid pro quo for the ADL? Who knows? Since the files were “privately owned” their contents weren’t subject to FOIA and were never revealed though many lawsuits tried to crack them open.
Maybe Pelosi’s file contained something that could be used against her. And that information was given to a part of the permanent government that wanted to control Pelosi, not a particularly big leap. It’s not a big leap that there have been other spying operations on other politicians, and there is a neatly filed stack of information to be used when necessary. And Big Oil and the intelligence community are joined at the hip.
What do you want, regular or premium?
Wolfdaughter
OK, here’s my idea for renewable energy.
Have fart collectors in every home and public building. Anytime you felt a fart coming on, you would back up to one of these collectors and let loose. The farts would be funneled to a central place to run a–here it comes–a gas turbine. Benefits: infinitely renewable, farting would become socially acceptable, and us old folks relying on SS would become a useful part of society again. After all, we DO produce more. We aren’t called old farts for nothing!
Seriously, I want us to start a “Manhattan Project” for renewables, the sooner the better. I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes for such.
Wolfdaughter
OK, here’s my idea for renewable energy.
Have fart collectors in every home and public building. Anytime you felt a fart coming on, you would back up to one of these collectors and let loose. The farts would be funneled to a central place to run a–here it comes–a gas turbine. Benefits: infinitely renewable, farting would become socially acceptable, and us old folks relying on SS would become a useful part of society again. After all, we DO produce more. We aren’t called old farts for nothing!
Seriously, I want us to start a “Manhattan Project” for renewables, the sooner the better. I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes for such.
Blue Buddha
Here’s the interesting thing about methane (aka: natural gas): letting methane loose in the atmosphere is 25-72 times more damaging as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Since methane has only one carbon atom, burning it would make exactly the same amount of CO2 as it was in its original form. In other words, burning methane actually produces much less of a greenhouse effect than letting it loose into the atmosphere.
Therefore, I’m all for tapping it from sewage and waste piles, and burning it where thermal energy is needed.
w vincentz
Blue Buddha,
That’s a good point you bring concerning methane. The additional benefit includes the decrease of pollutants into marine environments, and, regarding river systems, better quality water for those that utilize it to drink.
grumpy realist
Would all those who scream and moan about storage of energy please look up something called “batteries” and “ultra-capacitors” and “flywheels–storage of energy in” and,”hydroelectric–storage of energy by”?
Another way is to go to a better system of distributed energy production–> co-gen systems running off natural gas producing electricity and hot water. (Efficiency of such systems is 83%. Much better than standard electricity production when you add the transmission/conversion lossage in.)
Also: new technology. I wouldn’t be surprised to see DC electronics come back in a big way if our major electricity production method was DC generated right outside your door.
The question is whether we have an energy policy plan for the future or remain with the present, which seems to consist of “sticking our heads in the sand and hoping everything works out right.”
jamey
PoC, again:
Translation: I think it’s hard; I write the way Deacon Mushrat from Pogo speaks; therefore we should not even try.
…And a hushed silence falls across the room.