The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” story is based on a long list of misunderstandings and apples to oranges comparisons. Somehow, people seem to believe that our economy of 7.5 billion people can get along with a very short list of energy supplies. This short list will not include fossil fuels. Some would exclude nuclear, as well. Without these energy types, we find ourselves with a short list of types of energy — what BP calls Hydroelectric, Geobiomass (geothermal, wood, wood waste, and other miscellaneous types; also liquid fuels from plants), Wind, and Solar.
Unfortunately, a transition to such a short list of fuels can’t really work. These are a few of the problems we encounter:
[1] Wind and solar are making extremely slow progress in helping the world move away from fossil fuel dependence.
In 2015, fossil fuels accounted for 86% of the world’s energy consumption, and nuclear added another 4%, based on data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Thus, the world’s “preferred fuels” made up only 10% of the total. Wind and solar together accounted for a little less than 2% of world energy consumption.
Figure 1. World energy consumption based on data from BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Our progress in getting away from fossil fuels has not been very fast, either. Going back to 1985, fossil fuels made up 89% of the total, and wind and solar were both insignificant. As indicated above, fossil fuels today comprise 86% of total energy consumption. Thus, in 30 years, we have managed to reduce fossil fuel consumption by 3% (=89% – 86%). Growth in wind and solar contributed 2% of this 3% reduction. At the rate of a 3% reduction every 30 years (or 1% reduction every ten years), it will take 860 years, or until the year 2877 to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels. And the “improvement” made to date was made with huge subsidies for wind and solar.
Figure 2. World electricity generation by source based on BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
The situation is a little less bad when looking at the electricity portion alone (Figure 2). In this case, wind amounts to 3.5% of electricity generated in 2015, and solar amounts to 1.1%, making a total of 4.6%. Fossil fuels account for “only” 66% of the total, so this portion seems to be the place where changes can be made. But replacing all fossil fuels, or all fossil fuels plus nuclear, with preferred fuels seems impossible.
[2] Grid electricity is probably the least sustainable form of energy we have.
If we are to transition to a renewables-based economy, we will need to transition to an electricity-based economy, since most of today’s renewables use electricity. Such an economy will need to depend on the electric grid.
The US electric grid is often called the “World’s Largest Machine.” The American Society of Civil Engineers gives a grade of D+ to America’s energy system. It says,
America relies on an aging electrical grid and pipeline distribution systems, some of which originated in the 1880s. Investment in power transmission has increased since 2005, but ongoing permitting issues, weather events, and limited maintenance have contributed to an increasing number of failures and power interruptions.
Simply maintaining the electric grid is difficult. One author writes about the challenges of replacing aging steel structures holding up power lines. Another writes about the need to replace transformers, before they fail catastrophically and interrupt services. The technology to maintain and repair the transmission lines demands that fossil fuels remain available. For one thing, helicopters are sometimes needed to install or repair transmission lines. Even if repairs are done by truck, oil products are needed to operate the trucks, and to keep the roads in good repair.
Electricity and, in fact, electricity dispensed by an electric grid, is in some sense the high point in our ability to create an energy product that “does more” than fossil fuels. Grid electricity allows electric machines of all types to work. It allows industrial users to create very high temperatures, and to hold them as needed. It allows computerization of processes. It is not surprising that people who are concerned about energy consumption in the future would want to keep heading in the same direction as we have been heading in the past. Unfortunately, this is the expensive, hard-to-maintain direction. Storms often cause electrical outages. We have a never-ending battle trying to keep the system operating.
[3] Our big need for energy is in the winter, when the sun doesn’t shine as much, and we can’t count on the wind blowing.
Clearly, we use a lot of electricity for air conditioning. It is difficult to imagine that air conditioning will be a major energy use for the long-term, however, if we are headed for an energy bottleneck. There is always the possibility of using fans instead, and living with higher indoor temperatures.
In parts of the world where it gets cold, it seems likely that a large share of future energy use will be to heat homes and businesses in winter. To illustrate the kind of seasonality that can result from the use of fuels for heating, Figure 3 shows a chart of US natural gas consumption by month. US natural gas is used for some (but not all) home heating. Natural gas is also used for electricity and industrial uses.
Figure 3. US natural gas consumption by month, based on US Energy Information Administration.
Clearly, natural gas consumption shows great variability, with peaks in usage during the winter. The challenge is to provide electrical supply that varies in a similar fashion, without using a lot of fossil fuels.
[4] If a family burns coal or natural gas directly for winter heat, but then switches to electric heat that is produced using the same fuel, the cost is likely to be higher. If there is a second change to a higher-cost type of electricity, the cost of heat will be even greater.
There is a loss of energy when fossil fuels or biomass are burned and transformed into electricity. BP tries to correct for this in its data, by showing the amount of fuel that would need to be burned to produce this amount of electricity, assuming a conversion efficiency of 38%. Thus, the energy amounts shown by BP for nuclear, hydro, wind and solar don’t represent the amount of heat that they could make, if used to heat apartments or to cook food. Instead, they reflect an amount 2.6 times as much (=1/38%), which is the amount of fossil fuels that would need to be burned in order to produce this electricity.
As a result, if a household changes from heat based on burning coal directly, to heat from coal-based electricity, the change tends to be very expensive. The Wall Street Journal reports, Beijing’s Plan for Cleaner Heat Leaves Villagers Cold:
Despite electricity subsidies for residential consumers, villagers interviewed about their state-supplied heaters said their overall costs had risen substantially. Several said it costs around $300 to heat their homes for the winter, compared with about $200 with coal.
The underlying problem is that burning coal in a power plant produces a better, but more expensive, product. If this electricity is used for a process that coal cannot perform directly, such as allowing a new automobile production plant, then this higher cost is easily absorbed by the economy. But if this higher-cost product simply provides a previously available service (heating) in a more expensive manner, it becomes a difficult cost for the economy to “digest.” It becomes a very expensive fix for China’s smog problem. It should be noted that this change works in the wrong direction from a CO2 perspective, because ultimately, more coal must be burned for heating because of the inefficiency of converting coal to electricity, and then using that electricity for heating.
How about later substituting wind electricity for coal-based electricity? China has a large number of wind turbines in the north of China standing idle. One problem is the high cost of erecting transmission lines that would transport this electricity to urban centers such as Beijing. Also, if these wind turbines were put in place, existing coal plants would operate fewer hours, causing financial difficulties for these coal generating units. If these companies need subsidies in order to continue paying their ongoing expenses (including payroll and debt repayment), this would create a second additional cost. Electricity prices would need to be higher, to cover these costs as well. A family who had difficulty affording heat with coal-based electricity would have an even greater problem affording wind-based electricity.
Heat for cooking and heat for creating hot water are similar to heat for keeping an apartment warm. It is less expensive (both in energy terms and in cost to the consumer) if coal or natural gas is burned directly to produce the heat, than if electricity is used instead. This again, has to do with the conversion efficiency of turning fossil fuels to electricity.
[5] Low energy prices for the consumer are very important. Unfortunately, many analyses of the benefit of wind or of solar give a misleading impression of their true cost, when added to the electric grid.
How should the cost of wind and solar be valued? Is it simply the cost of installing the wind turbines or solar panels? Or does it include all of the additional costs that an electricity delivery system must incur, if it is actually to incorporate this intermittent electricity into the electric grid system, and deliver it to customers where it is needed?
The standard answer, probably because it is easiest to compute, is that the cost is simply the cost (or energy cost) of the wind turbines or the solar panels themselves, plus perhaps an inverter. On this basis, wind and solar appear to be quite inexpensive. Many people have come to the conclusion that a transition to wind and solar might be helpful, based on this type of limited analysis.
Unfortunately, the situation is more complicated. Perhaps, the first few wind turbines and solar panels will not disturb the existing electrical grid system very much. But as more and more wind turbines or solar panels are added, there get to be additional costs. These include long distance transmission, electricity storage, and subsidies needed to keep backup electricity-generation in operation. When these costs are included, the actual total installed cost of delivering electricity gets to be far higher than the cost of the solar panels or wind turbines alone would suggest.
Energy researchers talk about the evaluation problem as being a “boundary issue.” What costs really need to be considered, when a decision is made as to whether it makes sense to add wind turbines or solar panels? Several other researchers and I feel that much broader boundaries are needed than are currently being used in most published analyses. We are making plans to write an academic article, explaining that current Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) calculations cannot really be compared to fossil fuel EROEIs, because of boundary issues. Instead, “Point of Use” EROEIs are needed. For wind and solar, Point of Use EROEIs will vary with the particular application, depending on the extent of the changes required to accommodate wind or solar electricity. In general, they are likely to be far lower than currently published wind and solar EROEIs. In fact, for some applications, they may be less than 1:1.
A related topic is return on human labor. Return on human labor is equivalent to how much a typical worker can afford to buy with his wages. In [4], we saw a situation where the cost of heating a home seems to increase, as a transition is made from (a) burning coal for direct use in heating, to (b) using electricity created by burning coal, to (c) using electricity created by wind turbines. This pattern is eroding the buying power of workers. This direction ultimately leads to collapse; it is not the direction that an economy would generally intentionally follow. If wind and solar are truly to be helpful, they need to be inexpensive enough that they allow workers to buy more, rather than less, with their wages.
[6] If we want heat in the winter, and we are trying to use solar and wind, we need to somehow figure out a way to store electricity from summer to winter. Otherwise, we need to operate a double system at high cost.
Energy storage for electricity is often discussed, but this is generally with the idea of storing relatively small amounts of electricity, for relatively short periods, such as a few hours or few days. If our real need is to store electricity from summer to winter, this will not be nearly long enough.
In theory, it would be possible to greatly overbuild the wind and solar system relative to summer electricity needs, and then build a huge amount of batteries in order to store electricity created during the summer for use in the winter. This approach would no doubt be very expensive. There would likely be considerable energy loss in the stored batteries, besides the cost of the batteries themselves. We would also run the risk of exhausting resources needed for solar panels, wind turbines, and/or batteries.
A much more workable approach would be to burn fossil fuels for heat during the winter, because they can easily be stored. Biomass, such as wood, can also be stored until needed. But it is hard to find enough biomass for the whole world to burn for heating homes and for cooking, without cutting down an excessively large share of the world’s trees. This is a major reason why moving away from fossil fuels is likely to be very difficult.
[7] There are a few countries that use an unusually large share of electricity in their energy mixes today. These countries seem to be special cases that would be hard for other countries to emulate.
Data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy indicates that the following countries have the highest proportion of electricity in their energy mixes.
- Sweden – 72.7%
- Norway – 69.5%
- Finland – 59.9%
- Switzerland – 57.5%
These are all countries that have low population and a significant hydroelectric supply. I would expect that the hydroelectric power is very inexpensive to produce, especially if the dams were built years ago, and are now fully paid for. Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland also have electricity from nuclear providing about a third of each of their electricity supplies. This nuclear electricity was built long ago, and thus is now paid for as well. The geography of countries may also reduce the use of traffic by cars, thus reducing the portion of gasoline in their energy mixes. It would be difficult for other countries to create equivalently inexpensive large supplies of electricity.
In general, rich countries have higher electricity shares than poorer countries:
- OECD Total – (Rich countries) – 2015 – 44.5%
- Non- OECD (Less rich countries) – 2015 – 39.3%
China is an interesting example. Its share of energy use from electricity changed as follows from 1985 to 2015:
- China – 1985 – 17.5%
- China – 2015 – 43.6%
In 1985, China seems to have used most of its coal directly, rather than converting it for use as electricity. This was likely not difficult to do, because coal is easy to transport, and it can be used for many heating needs simply by burning it. Later, industrialization allowed for much more use of electricity. This explains the rise in its electricity ratio to 43.6% in 2015, which is almost as high as the rich country ratio of 44.5%. If the electricity ratio rises further, it will likely be because electricity is being put to use in ways where it has less of a cost advantage, or even has a cost disadvantage, such as for heating and cooking.
[8] Hydroelectric power is great for balancing wind and solar, but it is available in limited quantities. It too has intermittency problems, limiting how much it can be counted on.
If we look at month-to-month hydroelectric generation in the US, we see that it too has intermittency problems. Its high month is May or June, when snow melts and sends hydroelectric output higher. It tends to be low in the fall and winter, so is not very helpful for filling the large gap in needed electricity in the winter.
Figure 4. US hydroelectric power by month, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
It also has a problem with not being very large relative to our energy needs. Figure 5 shows how US hydro, or the combination of hydro plus solar plus wind (hydro+S+W), matches up with current natural gas consumption.
Figure 5. US consumption of natural gas compared to hydroelectric power and compared to hydro plus wind plus solar (hydro+W+S), based on US Energy Information Administration data.
Of course, the electricity amounts (hydro and hydro+S+W) are “grossed up” amounts, showing how much fossil fuel energy would be required to make those quantities of electricity. If we want to use the electricity for heating homes and offices, or for cooking, then we should compare the heat energy of natural gas with that of hydro and hydro+S+W. In that case, the hydro and hydro+S+W amounts would be lower, amounting to only 38% of the amounts shown.
This example shows how limited our consumption of hydro, solar, and wind is compared to our current consumption of natural gas. If we also want to replace oil and coal, we have an even bigger problem.
[9] If we need to get along without fossil fuels for electricity generation, we would have to depend greatly on hydroelectric power. Hydro tends to have considerable variability from year to year, making it hard to depend on.
Nature varies not just a little, but a lot, from year to year. Hydro looks like a big stable piece of the total in Figures 1 and 2 that might be used for balancing wind and solar’s intermittency, but when a person looks at the year by year data, it is clear that the hydro amounts are quite variable at the country level.
Figure 6. Electricity generated by hydroelectric for six large European countries based on BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
In fact, hydroelectric power is even variable for larger groupings, such as the six countries in Figure 6 combined, and some larger countries with higher total hydroelectric generation.
Figure 7. Hydroelectricity generated by some larger countries, and by the six European countries in Figure 6 combined, based on BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
What we learn from Figures 6 and 7 is that even if a great deal of long distance transmission is used, hydro will be variable from year to year. In fact, the variability will be greater than shown on these charts, because the quantity of hydro available tends to be highest in the spring, and is often much lower during the rest of the year. (See Figure 4 for US hydro.) So, if a country wants to depend on hydro as its primary source of electricity, that country must set its expectations quite low in terms of what it can really count on.
And, of course, Saudi Arabia and several other Middle Eastern countries don’t have any hydroelectric power at all. Middle Eastern countries tend not to have biomass, either. So if these countries choose to use wind and solar to assist in electrical generation, and want to balance their intermittency with something else, they pretty much need to use something that is locally available, such as natural gas. Other countries with very low amounts of hydro (or none at all) include Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, Denmark, Netherlands, and South Africa.
These issues provide further reasons why countries will want to continue using fossil fuels, and perhaps nuclear, if they can.
[10] There has been a misunderstanding regarding the nature of our energy problem. Many people believe that we will “run out” of fossil fuels, or that the price of oil and other fuels will rise very high. In fact, our problem seems to be one of affordability: energy prices don’t rise high enough to cover the rising cost of producing electricity and other energy products. Adding wind and solar tends to make the problem of low commodity prices worse.
Ultimately, consumers can purchase only what their wages will allow them to purchase. Rising debt can help as well, for a while, but this has limits. As a result, lack of wage growth translates to a lack of growth in commodity prices, even if the cost of producing these commodities is rising. This is the opposite of what most people expect; most people have never considered the possibility that peak energy will come from low prices for all types of energy products, including uranium. Thus, we seem to be facing peak energy demand (represented as low prices), arising from a lack of affordability.
We can see the problem in the example of the Beijing family with a rising cost of heating its apartment. Economists would like to think that rising costs translate to rising wages, but this is not the case. If rising costs are the result of diminishing returns (for example, coal is from deeper, thinner coal seams), the impact is similar to growing inefficiency. The inefficient sector needs more workers and more resources, leaving fewer resources and workers for other more efficient sectors. The result is an economy that tends to contract because of growing inefficiency.
If we want to operate a double system, using wind and solar when it is available, and using fossil fuels at other times, the cost will be very high. The problem arises because the fossil fuel system has many fixed costs. For example, coal mines and natural gas companies need to continue to pay interest on their loans, or they will default. Pipelines need to operate 365 days per year, regardless of whether they are actually full. The question is how to get enough funding for this double system.
One pricing system for electricity that doesn’t work well is the “market pricing system” based on each producer’s marginal costs of production. Wind and solar are subsidized, so they tend to have negative marginal costs of production. It is impossible for any other type of electricity producer to compete in this system. It is well known that this system does not produce enough revenue to maintain the whole system.
Sometimes, additional “capacity payments” are auctioned off, to try to fix the problem of inadequate total wholesale electricity prices. If we believe the World Nuclear Organization, even these charges are not enough. Several US nuclear power plants are scheduled for closing, indirectly because this pricing methodology is making older nuclear power plants unprofitable. Natural gas prices have also been too low for producers in recent years. This electricity pricing methodology is one of the reasons for this problem as well, in my opinion.
A different pricing system that works much better in our current situation is the utility pricing system, or “cost plus” pricing. In this system, prices are determined by regulators, based on a review of all necessary costs, including appropriate profit margins for producers. In the case of a double system, it allows prices to be high enough to cover all the needed costs, including the extra long distance transmission lines, plus all of the high fixed costs of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, operating for fewer hours per year.
Of course, these much higher electricity rates eventually will become unaffordable for the consumer, leading to a cutback in purchases. If enough of these cutbacks in purchases occur, the result will be recession. But at least the electricity system doesn’t fail at an early date because of inadequate profits for its producers.
Conclusion
The possibility of making a transition to an all-renewables system seems virtually impossible, for the reasons I have outlined above. I have outlined many other issues in previous posts:
- Intermittent Renewables Can’t Favorably Transform Grid Electricity
- Ten Reasons Intermittent Renewables (Wind and Solar PV) are a Problem
- EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are Misleading
- Obstacles Facing US Wind Energy
- Eight Pitfalls in Evaluating Green Energy Solutions
- Eight Energy Myths Explained
- Scientific American’s Path to Sustainability: Let’s Think about the Details
- The real oil limits story; what other researchers missed
The topic doesn’t seem to go away, because it is appealing to have a “solution” to what seems to be a predicament with no solution. In a way, wind and solar are like a high-cost placebo. If we give these to the economy, at least people will think we are treating the problem, and maybe our climate problem will get a little better.
Meanwhile, we find more and more real life problems with intermittent renewables. Australia has had a series of blackouts. A several-hour blackout in South Australia was tied partly to the high level of intermittent energy on the grid. The ways of reducing future recurrences appear to be very expensive.
Antonio Turiel has written about the problems that Spain is encountering. Spain added large amounts of wind and solar, but these have not been available during a recent cold spell. It added gas by pipeline from Algeria, but now Algeria has cut back on the amount it is supplying. It has added transmission lines north to France. Now, Turiel is concerned that Spain’s electricity prices will be persistently higher, because he believes that France has not taken sufficient preparations to meet its own electricity needs. If there were little interconnectivity between countries, France’s electricity problems would stay in France, rather than adversely affecting its neighbors. A person begins to wonder: Can transmission lines have an adverse impact on new electricity supply? If a country can hope that “the market” will supply electricity from elsewhere, does that country take adequate steps to provide its own electricity?
In my opinion, the time has come to move away from believing that everything that is called “renewable” is helpful to the system. We now have real information on how expensive wind and solar are, when indirect costs are included. Unfortunately, in the real world, high-cost is ultimately a deal killer, because wages don’t rise at the same time. We need to understand where we really are, not live in a fairy tale world produced by politicians who would like us to believe that the situation is under control.
Wind and solar adoption should proceed at a much faster rate going forward since the costs of both have declined considerably. If you ignore their variable output (I know), the cost of wind is below natural gas in the central part of the United States. Solar has seen big price drops and is closing in on wind in terms of cost.
” Solar has seen big price drops and is closing in on wind in terms of cost.” – All commodities are collapsing in value. So measuring cost of solar in terms of dollars is irrelevant. The cost in energy terms is what really matters.
Solar and wind have gotten cheaper relative to coal/natural gas/nuclear.
If you want to bankrupt the world …. by all means roll out more solar and wind ….
Germany’s Expensive Gamble on Renewable Energy : Germany’s electricity prices soar to more than double that of the USA because when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind does not blow they have to operate and pay for a completely separate back up system that is fueled by lignite coal http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602
Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables
Even as Germany adds lots of wind and solar power to the electric grid, the country’s carbon emissions are rising. Will the rest of the world learn from its lesson? After years of declines, Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs. That’s happening because even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/
Why Germany’s nuclear phaseout is leading to more coal burning
Between 2011 and 2015 Germany will open 10.7 GW of new coal fired power stations. This is more new coal coal capacity than was constructed in the entire two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The expected annual electricity production of these power stations will far exceed that of existing solar panels and will be approximately the same as that of Germany’s existing solar panels and wind turbines combined. Solar panels and wind turbines however have expected life spans of no more than 25 years. Coal power plants typically last 50 years or longer. At best you could call the recent developments in Germany’s electricity sector contradictory. https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-germanys-nuclear-phaseout-is-leading-to-more-coal-burning/
A lot of countries must be trying to go bankrupt then. Renewables keep increasing worldwide.
Yes they are because they are a FF extender, like adding ethanol to gasoline. Without them we would have been dead a decade ago. As FF’s go so does the tech and the misnamed parasitic renewables.
It increases consumption of fossil fuels, since “renewables” are merely fossil fuel extenders, for they could not and cannot exist without the complex fossil fuel based civilization that invented them. Pity those fuels are finite, as is the planet’s capacity to absorb its wastes, and suffer its insults.
That’s what keeps the world going, until…
http://static.rogerebert.com/redactor_assets/pictures/56fac2b69df9c7d17a0000d0/thelma_louise_cliff-1.jpg
http://www.aladat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/cool-famous-quotes-einstein-two-things-are-infinite-the-universe-and-human-stupidity-not-sure-about-1024×576.jpg
The cost of the wind and solar itself has dropped, but we are finding out more about the true cost of installation, such as the need for long distance transmission, buried underground, because it needs to go into densely populated areas where the neighbors object. We are also finding that if we subsidize wind and solar, we have to subsidize everything else. It is becoming clearer that the it is very difficult to get intermittency problems to disappear, as more are added. In fact, this presentation says that the intermittency problem gets worse, the more intermittent renewables we add. Early models said that offsets would allow the intermittency problem to get better.
Also, some costs that intermittent renewables have been able to dump on the grid in the past, intermittent renewables will have to pay in the future. There is something called reactive power, which is needed on the grid to keep voltage up. FERC is changing the rules, so that wind will have to shoulder at least some of this cost.
Doesn’t matter how much the price drops — the reality is that due to the intermittancy — a totally separate — and expensive — back up system is required (coal/gas/nuclear) so you end up with extremely high priced power.
This creates a huge drag on your economy as people are forced to spend more on electricity cutting back on other purchases ….
It also makes your industry less competitive — which allows manufacturers in places that have cheaper electricity to undercut on pricing — which will drive your industries out of business…
But before that happens industries will move their factories to lower cost countries i.e. those that are wisely burning cheap coal to generate power —- resulting in massive job losses — which again hammers your economy.
Adopting ‘renewable’ energy to any significant scale —- is sure to result in disaster for a country.
Tesla just put up a grid battery storage facility in a little over 3 months:
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/01/31/tesla-needs-just-three-months-complete-worlds-largest-grid-storage-facility/
How many billions in subsidies?
Get your weeping hanky out…. I have some very sad news for you…
Replacement of oil by alternative sources
While oil has many other important uses (lubrication, plastics, roadways, roofing) this section considers only its use as an energy source. The CMO is a powerful means of understanding the difficulty of replacing oil energy by other sources.
SRI International chemist Ripudaman Malhotra, working with Crane and colleague Ed Kinderman, used it to describe the looming energy crisis in sobering terms.[13] Malhotra illustrates the problem of producing one CMO energy that we currently derive from oil each year from five different alternative sources. Installing capacity to produce 1 CMO per year requires long and significant development.
Allowing fifty years to develop the requisite capacity, 1 CMO of energy per year could be produced by any one of these developments:
4 Three Gorges Dams,[14] developed each year for 50 years, or
52 nuclear power plants,[15] developed each year for 50 years, or
104 coal-fired power plants,[16] developed each year for 50 years, or
32,850 wind turbines,[17][18] developed each year for 50 years, or
91,250,000 rooftop solar photovoltaic panels[19] developed each year for 50 years
The world consumes approximately 3 CMO annually from all sources. The table [10] shows the small contribution from alternative energies in 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top Google engineers
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
I really – really … like this photo!
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/B0hFSktb0jk/maxresdefault.jpg
While you no doubt like the “Simply Won’t Work” in the headline regarding the Google engineers, it is not what they were saying and the article does say this: “Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. ”
If you read the Vox article on them, you will see that they are saying that renewables will not lower CO2 emissions enough – just by being the cheapest source of new electricity. They say that as long as existing fossil fuel power plants are not retired pre-maturely, then the world will still be in trouble from Climate Change. So they are hoping for a solution that is so cheap that all existing – not just new – electricity production switches to it.
So they are hoping for a solution that is so cheap that all existing – not just new – electricity production switches to it.
Now, where have we heard that before?
http://stone.com/wtf/images/04a-TooCheapToMeter.png
If renewables are not cheaper, switching really can’t work, in fact. The subsidies needed for renewables cause huge problems for the overall system.
I am re-reading that article …. and this is what they are saying:
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
Which ties in with this:
Replacement of oil by alternative sources
While oil has many other important uses (lubrication, plastics, roadways, roofing) this section considers only its use as an energy source.
The CMO is a powerful means of understanding the difficulty of replacing oil energy by other sources. SRI International chemist Ripudaman Malhotra, working with Crane and colleague Ed Kinderman, used it to describe the looming energy crisis in sobering terms.[13] Malhotra illustrates the problem of producing one CMO energy that we currently derive from oil each year from five different alternative sources. Installing capacity to produce 1 CMO per year requires long and significant development.
Allowing fifty years to develop the requisite capacity, 1 CMO of energy per year could be produced by any one of these developments:
4 Three Gorges Dams,[14] developed each year for 50 years, or
52 nuclear power plants,[15] developed each year for 50 years, or
104 coal-fired power plants,[16] developed each year for 50 years, or
32,850 wind turbines,[17][18] developed each year for 50 years, or
91,250,000 rooftop solar photovoltaic panels[19] developed each year for 50 years
The world consumes approximately 3 CMO annually from all sources. The table [10] shows the small contribution from alternative energies in 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
No, you are quoting what the author of the article said, not what the Google researchers said.
Looking at the Wikipedia articles, the UK got 9.4% of their electricity from wind in 2014 and 2.49% from solar in 2015. No figures for either for 2016.
Have you got a filter installed in your brain that does not allow logic and facts in?
Why Germany’s nuclear phaseout is leading to more coal burning
Between 2011 and 2015 Germany will open 10.7 GW of new coal fired power stations. This is more new coal coal capacity than was constructed in the entire two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The expected annual electricity production of these power stations will far exceed that of existing solar panels and will be approximately the same as that of Germany’s existing solar panels and wind turbines combined. Solar panels and wind turbines however have expected life spans of no more than 25 years.
Coal power plants typically last 50 years or longer. At best you could call the recent developments in Germany’s electricity sector contradictory.
https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-germanys-nuclear-phaseout-is-leading-to-more-coal-burning/
This article is on the same subject: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603531/tesla-just-added-a-huge-stack-of-batteries-to-the-california-power-grid/?set=603536
It says
Also:
We will have to see how this really works out in practice. They must have been pretty desperate to need the have needed the grid storage unit put up that fast.
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A new FEASTA article on debt and collapse.
End of the “Oilocene”. The Demise of the Global Oil Industry and of the Global Economic System as we know it.
Website link, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-31/end-of-the-oilocene-the-demise-of-the-global-oil-industry-and-of-the-global-economic-system-as-we-know-it/
‘Our industrial food production system uses over 10 calories of oil energy to plough, plant, fertilise, harvest, transport, refine, package, store/refrigerate, and deliver 1 calorie of food to the consumer.’
The Mother of All Famines approaches….
I have read that before somewhere about it taking so many calories of energy just for one calorie of nutrition. It is just insanity.
well that was a cheery article to start the day
Seems to be by someone named Tim Clarke, whom I don’t know. Lots of my graphs copied in the mix.
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If we had slowed down 40 years ago, slowing down mainly meaning universal one child policy…
There would be (not so much) less people on Earth, not sure how much, say 5-6 bn; but it would be a much older pyramid
There would be full employment, but economical growth wouldn’t have been really hurt: everybody would be consuming more per capita; oil and ores would have been depleted at almost the same rate
Many things would be unchanged, but one child way of life would have been settled and future would surely look better
Lots of reasons why this path was avoided, namely the competition among three camps: the West, the Soviet Union and Middle East oil owners
I’ve not read him, but perhaps Malthus was wrong on a detail. He said the exponential growth of Mankind was dependent on male-female attraction, but 40 years ago we already had very good ways to divert it from pregnancy; a bit of religious bias (it seems he didn’t figured out maximum entropy principle)
It is said aliens are watching us. Perhaps we’re just an experiment over this kind of issues
I have posted previously … research that indicates population increases are responsible for over 30% of global growth.
Slash 30% off of global GDP with a global one child policy and we would not be hear having this conversation
Dr. Pangloss may have been right after all.
Strange as it may seem to say so, this is INDEED the best of all possible worlds.
Had things been otherwise, we would not be having this conversation.
Well, China’s GDP recently boomed with almost no population increase… Perhaps aliens insuflated them this policy to see what happened…
This may be of interest:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6e/Population_Growth_in_China.jpg
In any event, population is obviously not the only contributor to GDP….. cheap energy is critical … as is debt.
Obviously if you do this — you could get a big spike in GDP for a limited amount of time — even if population was stagnant…
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/injx6kMnkzYU/v2/800x-1.png
It’s kind of like a person running up 10 credit cards to the max…. it doesn’t end well…
This seems like very shallow thinking…
1) Yes Renewables are a small part of current production. That will not be true forever. That growth on a “Global” scale looks small, but if you look at segmented markets you see fantastic growth, and that growth is spreading. The CAGR growth in green energy is some 30%/year… that’s going to compound. I’m sure Tverberg will say this same thing in 4 years when it’s at 10%.
2) Green energy comes in different flavors, she leaves off Geothermal. You want to heat a house, a geothermal system is much more efficient.
3) She leaves off technology change. Demand is dropping.
This article is full of shallow thinkgin.
Patrick – what’s your take on the following?
Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables
Even as Germany adds lots of wind and solar power to the electric grid, the country’s carbon emissions are rising. Will the rest of the world learn from its lesson? After years of declines, Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs. That’s happening because even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/
Germany’s Expensive Gamble on Renewable Energy : Germany’s electricity prices soar to more than double that of the USA because when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind does not blow they have to operate and pay for a completely separate back up system that is fueled by lignite coal http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602
Why Germany’s nuclear phaseout is leading to more coal burning
Between 2011 and 2015 Germany will open 10.7 GW of new coal fired power stations. This is more new coal coal capacity than was constructed in the entire two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The expected annual electricity production of these power stations will far exceed that of existing solar panels and will be approximately the same as that of Germany’s existing solar panels and wind turbines combined. Solar panels and wind turbines however have expected life spans of no more than 25 years. Coal power plants typically last 50 years or longer. At best you could call the recent developments in Germany’s electricity sector contradictory. https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-germanys-nuclear-phaseout-is-leading-to-more-coal-burning/
Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top Google engineers
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
And how do you feel about this?
http://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/77/42/1254314035-Albert-Einstein-quote-on-stupidity.jpg
Buddy, you can’t come along here dissing the blog owner, whilst forgetting to turn on spell check…
Ahem…
1) So, explain to us exactly where all the energy will come from to fuel this massive transition in infrastructure?
Who would be able to fund it, let alone afford it? Global debt levels are already crushing and money printing, accounting shenanigans and other phoney baloney we’ve seen these past 9 years are now pushing on a string in their effectiveness.
What political consensus would last this long anyway? As we’ve seen with the election of Donald Trump, it only takes one stroke of the pen to eliminate programs that might have some beneficial effect.
How long will it take? Given history, a typical energy transition take between 30 and 50 years to mature.
Where all the pollution (inc. carbon dioxide) will go?
What surplus of energy will be left over to power civilisation with its existing energy system, the one we all rely on currently for survival, whilst this multi-decade project unfolds?
2) Geothermal is site specific, not all places, or even many, have access to bountiful quantities of heat just below their feet. And any large distances between source and destination (e.g. hot rocks in central Australia) are prohibitively expensive to span and do not add up economically.
3) Technological change doesn’t seem to be improving things lately, if anything it’s making matters worse (e.g. accelerated global warming, ecological destruction, resource depletion). Since we just trade one set of limits, for other, greater ones, all the while furthering human overshoot. You do understand the concepts of limits, overshoot and the exponential function?
If anything it’s you who are displaying shallowness of thought. Let me offer you a leg up, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-15/albert-bartlett-on-message-about-exponential-growth-to-the-end/. This is a good place to start.
Also the Hirsch Report on peak oil, mitigation and risk management, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-02-09/hirsch-report-back-doe-website/
Please come back to us when you’ve learnt some humility.
Disadvantages Of Geothermal Energy
1. Not Widespread Source of Energy : Since this type of energy is not widely used therefore the unavailability of equipment, staff, infrastructure, training pose hindrance to the installation of geothermal plants across the globe. Not enough skilled manpower and availability of suitable build location pose serious problem in adopting geothermal energy globally.
2. High Installation Costs : To get geothermal energy, requires installation of power plants, to get steam from deep within the earth and this require huge one time investment and require to hire a certified installer and skilled staff needs to be recruited and relocated to plant location. Moreover, electricity towers, stations need to set up to move the power from geothermal plant to consumer.
3. Can Run Out Of Steam : Geothermal sites can run out of steam over a period of time due to drop in temperature or if too much water is injected to cool the rocks and this may result huge loss for the companies which have invested heavily in these plants. Due to this factor, companies have to do extensive initial research before setting up the plant.
4. Suited To Particular Region : It is only suitable for regions which have hot rocks below the earth and can produce steam over a long period of time. For this great research is required which is done by the companies before setting up the plant and this initial cost runs up the bill in setting up the geothermal power plant. Some of these regions are near hilly areas or high up in mountains.
5. May Release Harmful Gases : Geothermal sites may contain some poisonous gases and they can escape deep within the earth, through the holes drilled by the constructors. The geothermal plant must therefore be capable enough to contain these harmful and toxic gases.
6. Transportation : Geothermal Energy can not be easily transported. Once the tapped energy is extracted, it can be only used in the surrounding areas. Other sources of energy like wood, coal or oil can be transported to residential areas but this is not a case with geothermal energy. Also, there is a fear of toxic substances getting released into the atmosphere.
http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/disadvantages_geothermalenergy.php
Patrick… I just felt I had to
http://www.jarofquotes.com/img/quotes/7143e6a4e7fb6020c609b0357b3fcbba.jpg
I think geothermal works best where there is a hot source near the surface. This is not normally where anyone wants to build cities.
I keep saying that demand is dropping. This means that prices are lower and lower, relative to the cost of production. This is a great way to get to collapse!
Geothermal is in the numbers I quoted to you. It works some places, less well others.
The compound growth rate of some kinds of green energy has been high, but other kinds have been low. I am showing you the overall total.
Energy and Money are not the same.
Money is a representative of energy.
But if you print too much of it — then it is toilet paper.
So technically … you are correct
Money is a form of governmental debt that promises goods and services made available by future energy, if that future energy happens to be available.
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Tick Tock….
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/30/is-italys-banking-problem-becoming-too-big-to-solve/
Exxon’s Profit Miss Shows No One Immune From Market Ravages
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/exxon-misses-estimates-as-recovery-from-slump-proves-elusive
Exxon Mobil Corp.’s biggest profit miss in at least a decade is the starkest sign yet that major oil explorers remain mired in the deepest market slump in a generation.
After resisting the industry trend of discounting the value of oil and natural gas fields that turned into money-losers amid the 2 1/2-year market slump, Exxon capitulated on Tuesday and took a $2 billion hit on the value of some Rocky Mountain gas. Shares fell 2 percent to $83.16 at 11:03 a.m. in New York.
For Exxon, it was the ninth-straight quarter of year-over-year profit declines, the longest such streak since at least 1988. The bleak result in Rex Tillerson’s final quarter at the helm was presaged last week when Chevron Corp. disclosed its first annual loss in at least 37 years and may signal a string of disappointing results from rivals Royal Dutch Shell Plc, BP Plc and Total SA in coming days.
Tillerson is leaving just in time.
Most people reading that article will not get nervous … because it leaves out a key factor…. which is that oil cannot (at least for very long) rise in price to a) allow producers to turn a profit and b) encourage them to look for new sources of oil…
Most people will think that this is just part of a cycle — that eventually the price of oil can and will rise dramatically — because it has to…
Financially literate people would know that high oil prices = recession …. they conveniently choose not to acknowledge that.
we’ll all have one of these in the back yard
energy problem sorted!!
IMG_1184.jpeg
sorry—pic didnt transfer over
the pic was meant to be this one
http://www.darwincountry.org/explore/021110.html?sid=
Mrs and Fast and I got roaring drunk at the pub in Ironbridge a few years ago….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge#/media/File:The_Iron_Bridge_(8542).jpg
In order for the image to show up, you need to upload the image to a website somewhere, and then give a link to the web address of the photo. There are many ways you can do this. One way is to set up a fake blog site, and have each photo be a blog.
Alternatively, you can email me the photo, and I can put it up on OurFiniteWorld.com. My e-mail is GailTverberg at comcast dot net.
@Gail
I reposted the image a second time.
It didn’t show the actual photo but the link worked ok
thanks for the info btw for adding pics
@Eddy
I didn’t know you’d been to Ironbridge—
Its write down is still very low compared to that of other major oil companies. There may be more to come.
Not so good!
If delivering low-carbon electricity is the name of the game, nuclear power had better be the way we go.
In the UK, offshore wind’s intermittent electricity costs ~5X more than nuclear power’s 24/7 electricity:
http://idiocyofrenewables.blog…
http://idiocyofrenewables.blog…
Onshore wind’s intermittent electricity costs ~2x more than nuclear power’s 24/7 electricity:
http://prismsuk.blogspot.co.uk…
The reason is simple – wind power uses 19.2X more metals and 9.6X more concrete than nuclear:
http://idiocyofrenewables.blog…
“The reason is simple – wind power uses 19.2X more metals and 9.6X more concrete than nuclear:”
Roughly, utility scale ground PV takes around 500 kg of metals and concrete to generate a kW. And that is not counting storage.
In contrast, power from space takes about 1/100th of that mass because the collector surfaces don’t need to stand up to gravity and wind. And power from space does not need storage. Of course there are lots of problems with lifting millions of tons of parts to high orbits.
But at least one of the potential showstoppers has been shown by NOAA not to be a big concern. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000399/full
“Our results show that H2-fueled launch vehicles can have significant global impacts at sufficiently high emission or launch rates. Compared with estimates of the global impacts of a hydrocarbon-fueled rocket [Ross et al., 2010], our results substantiate assertions that, by some measures, H2-fueled rockets are indeed “clean,” though such conclusions must be made with caution. Obtaining our results required the use of a modern atmospheric chemistry/climate model because the emissions are distributed over large ranges in space and time and interact with complex chemical and dynamical features of the climate system. We conclude that it is important to make a more detailed examination of the potential global impacts of all rocket propellant types whose use might be expected to grow significantly in the future, including kerosene-fueled and solid rocket motors, both of which can be expected to have a much greater global impact per launch than H2-fueled systems of the kind modeled here.”
I think space solar and thorium, and perhaps fusion, might have a similar problems. They may be “doable” from a technical sense, but perhaps only in a moonshot or manhattan project footing, which may not be possible in today’s economic climate. It might not even be possible for a single government to do, it might take a world effort. Is it possible today to invest billions or trillions over years/decades before the returns start rolling in? I have my doubts, especially when you account for some of the issues Nate Hagens brings up about humans behavior(his talks about energy/economics are pretty well covered on this blog):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOq7pdFF4iI
Space solar, thorium and fusion may all work on paper. But we many not be able to get them working in the real world due to the huge startup costs, both in time and energy.
I apparently missed it the first time I viewed it, but he uses a slide of Gails @ 17:46!
Nate writes to me, asking me to make him graphs of particular types. So it may have been one I made specially for him.
If I draw a picture of Santa Claus flying across the sky in a sled pulled by reindeer…. that too works on paper….
Did Alvinn Weinberg, who cut his teeth on the Manhattan project, helped design the first production nuclear reactor, then designed the PWR, ran Oak Ridge for 2 decades, think Santa rolls in a reindeer powered flying sled? Cause he believed in liquid reactors, and wanted to give Thorium a shot cause it looked promising and the Oak Ridge test Molten Salt Reactor proved liquid reactors were viable.
The dude that INVENTED the first generation of nuke tech the world uses today wanted to see if they could use Thorium in a Molten Salt Reactor and if it would ramp up and scale up. But others wanted breeder reactors that could more easily make weapons grade material we could use for bombs, so Molten/Liquid Reactors research got the heave ho, cause we were hitting peak american oil and this nuclear stuff is expensive. We needed to focus on one nuclear tech, and fast breeders were it. Who cares if there is a better solution, the military needs its weapons…
I get it you don’t want to put your hopes in some silly delusional magical technologial.
This might not be that, it might be the real deal, but the only way to find out is to give it a go. Some smart people that knew what they were doing didn’t get a chance to see if it would pan out. Not because it looked risky, but because we only had enough money to bankroll one branch on the nuclear tech tree and the military got its wish. We didn’t need the benefits it offered at the time, but we sure do now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Weinberg
Maybe someone could tweet this to the new president, and instead of spending half a billion to cool tents on the other side of the planet, we could give a LFTR a chance to see if it can do in the real world what is seems to be able to do on paper.
In a February 2011 interview with Kiki Sanford (two months prior to the founding of Flibe Energy) Sorensen estimated that the production cost of a LFTR (i.e. once research and development has finished), would be on the order of $1–2 per watt, making it competitive with the construction costs of natural gas plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_Sorensen
“I love Humanity but I hate humans”
― Albert Einstein
I hear you loud and clear!
I am a fairly accomplished individual …. in my own mind at least.
And I too have so many great ideas that I would like to act on — but I lack the billions in funding.
IDEA 1.
Breed a sheep and a solar panel — eliminating the need to burn coal and dig up materials required to manufacture a solar panel
Idea 2.
Build a pipe (titanium of course) to the sun — it’s actually quite simple — you just keep attaching sections until it reaches the sun — you then take a sledge hammer and drive that sumbitch right into the centre of the sun — you then tap the hot stuff to create steam on earth driving tens of thousands of turbines creating unlimited free cheap energy.
Idea 2.1
Build a pipe (titanium of course) and drive sections if it into the earth until you reach the molten core – you then tap the hot stuff to create steam on earth driving tens of thousands of turbines creating unlimited free cheap energy.
I cannot understand why I cannot get the required funding — these are good ideas — Mrs Fast is always telling me that I am the next Nick Tesla…
The thing is….
There are trillions of dollars flooding the global economy …. they are being invested into the most idiotic things …. including Tesla ……
One of the key sales pitches of Tesla is setting up a colony on Mars. And investors throw money at Elon
The money is there for the taking — if people will invest in a Mars colony — and they decline to fund a Thorium project….
You really gotta wonder if perhaps the Thorium project has an even less chance of success than the Mars colony.
Am I out of line here? Am I being crazy? Am I making sense?
http://www.teammarcopolo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/7d5ba1a67be227d32c8a6552b82976e7.jpg
I see that Toshiba /Westinghouse is will no longer be building nuclear power plants. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/toshiba-to-put-a-halt-to-nuclear-power-plant-business-ambitions.html They are losing too much money making the hugely expensive plants. No one can afford electricity, at the price it has to sell for, with all of the safety requirements post Fukushima. This was announced in the last 24 hours.
French nuclear company Areva has many problems. There is a defective parts scandal in France. http://www.thelocal.fr/20160617/france-shuts-nuclear-reactor-in-areva-parts-scandal
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/03/frances-nuclear-giant-areva-admits-to-400-irregularities-in-nucl/
A January 17, 2017 article says, European Commission approves Areva Restructuring Plan.
With these two big “players” getting out of the field, how do you expect this to happen? It seems like the same rising cost and rising complexity issues would be affecting other nuclear plant builders as well.
Regarding increased efficiency/less demand:
Heat pumps ( run by electricity ) for heating houses and buildings are efficient enough that they overcome the efficiency losses ( net 100-38% = 62% losses ) in generating and transmitting electric power used directly in resistance type heaters compared to burning the fossil fuels on site. If these heat pumps could be run, at least in part, by micro, in situ, solar/wind – battery setups they would help reduce the total CO2 load going into the atmosphere. Assuming ongoing rapid development in battery technology continues these setups could become economically attractive to consumers.
https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=most_efficient.me_geothermal_heat_pumps
Due to decreased or intermittent demand as a result of this we would need to subsidize the large scale power utilities, which could be repurposed for supplying transportation demand. This would be possible if we stopped subsidizing some other non-productive sectors.
But it likely won’t happen in time to save us from the, ultimately far greater, greenhouse gas dilemma.
You are linking to geothermal heat pumps, not the air source heat pumps. These need pipes to be buried underground. I don’t know too much about them. Dave Summers (Heading Out) of The Oil Drum wrote that the university in Rolla, Missouri, where he taught was planning to use such a system, and that there would be quite a savings.
One concern when geothermal heat is used is that the heat source will degrade over time.
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Thanks for another detailed explanation of why renewables will never be able to replace the current mix of renewables and non renewables. I would like to mention a few points of emphasis as well. First: many authors(not Gail!) give the impression t hat electricity is a source of energy like fossil fuels. Electricity is a CARRIER of energy. Electricity generated by burning of fossil fuels is very inefficient. Burning one gallon of oil(diesel, crude) with a gross energy content of of 140 million joules will release about 40 million joules as waste heat or 29%.. With the 71% now left as available energy you can heat your house or factory directly losing some efficiency depending upon the efficiency of the appliance but as Gail; says if you take that devitalized hydrocarbon fuel(coal, oil) with 71% of the energy left and boil water, spin a turbine, change voltage and force it down a transmission line you end up losing another 50% of the energy yielding a power plant with 33-38% of the delivered energy of the original fuel. The efficiency numbers are lowest for coal, better for oil and best for gas because the energy content of the various fuels increases in that direction. It is a crying shame that there isn’t an easy way to figure EROEI of all the various ways to produce energy and electricity and the way it is usually done using life cycle analysis is far too detailed and complex. The complexity is magnified by the myriad of energy units using volume, mass, metric/british units, Kw, oil equivalents etc etc.!! What do you include in the EROEI of a wind unit? Mining the materials, transporting, assembling, wages , maintenance etc??? Not to mention variability of energy production. Perhaps the best way to calculate energy available to do work like spinning a generator or turbine is to know how much net energy is left over for society after that coal is dug and transported, that oil or gas is extracted, processed and delivered. As the cheap coal, oil and gas is depleted more and more energy and money goes into just getting the stuff out of the ground because the coal is deeper and lower grade, the oil is deeper,of higher viscosity and cut with more water etc. At some point when the energy delivered equals the energy to mine it, the party is over. EROEI is now 1. We are more than halfway there with oil and anthracite or high grade coal. The residual energy left over after mining these fuels had been returned to society as wealth, and energy to do work, to create new jobs,make new technology powered by that energy surplus for the last 200 years. Remove that surplus which creates growth and wealth and wages and GDP and your industrial machine grinds slowly to a halt. What wasn’t mentioned was oil’s importance in electricity generation. Oil runs almost all of those mines and oil and gas rigs, runs the generators, delivers the raw materials and finished products, carries the workers, installs the wind turbines, does all the maintenance on the transmission lines etc. Remember Leibig’s Law?
The rate limiting step in least supply controls the process. All of this talk about electricity and renewables falls flat on its face and is just so much yakerty yak without oil. Oil field depletion is FAR more advanced on thermodynamic grounds that is reported by most analysts and energy organizations. The big legacy fields are depleting at 5-8%/yr and new oil discoveries have not kept up with consumption for decades. Renewables wont stand a chance without plenty of cheap oil backing them up.
Ok Got It 😎
Nice post it really is obvious if you know where to look. Every durable good is a reflection of Surplus energy. However your EROEI of 1 what are you specifically referring to?
EROEI = 1 is the belief that we can continue to operate our economy until Energy Out = Energy In, in energy production processes. (EROEI = Energy Out/ Energy In)
This isn’t really the correct limit, in my opinion (or in the opinion of Prof. Charles Hall). But a lot of people seem to believe it.
In my opinion, a much more important limit to look at is Return on Human Labor, which is EROEI of Human Labor, and seeing whether it is rising or falling. I talk about this a bit in the article. This has to do with wages, and whether non-elite workers are becoming richer or poorer, in terms of the amount of goods and services that they can afford to buy. I see this as the major issue.
But even if we want to look at what I call “Fossil Fuel EROEI,” the problem is that the analysis is only done “at the wellhead.” At a minimum, the energy has to get to the user. One estimate (by Hall) is that for fossil fuels, there is also something like a 3:1 factor to get the energy from the wellhead to the user. The problem with intermittent renewables is that you need a lot more than a 3:1 factor, to get the intermittent electricity from the solar panel/wind turbine to the industrial user (or other user) who actually needs it. This is the “narrow boundary” issue I talked about. To calculate EROEI on a delivered electricity basis, you have to correct for the intermittency. as well. As far as I can see, when all is said and done, intermittent electricity only substitutes for fuel (such as coal). At the same adds huge costs to the system, in terms of long distance transmission, generation that needs to be kept operating at low levels so that it can be ramped up quickly when it is needed to offset intermittency, and subsidies to keep fully paid for electric generating units for coal, natural gas, and nuclear from closing their doors. So it seems likely that in most applications, the EROEI of intermittent renewables is really less than 1:1, when the electricity gets to the door of the customer who will actually use it.
That’s why the big national players perform in the later stages whatever unimaginable tricks and hyenous acts on global scale just to stay afloat by burning everything around in effort to get to these half cooked remains like shales or bitumens to be deployed to action as needed liquid fuel..
Therefore also “the religious” split here on the forum / commentariat between “fast and slow” collapsniks, because even span of decades does matter in personal – family life afterall.
I agree that renewables won’t stand a chance without oil backing them up.
One thing about wind and solar PV is that the EROEIs that are calculated as if it is OK just to dump intermittent electricity on the grid, the way it is. In fact, you need long distance transmission; you need to add “reactive power” to the electric grid; you need storage to try to handle the spikes; you need an amazing amount of storage if you want to run the system on renewables alone. Otherwise, you need to subsidize the other providers. This doesn’t get into EROEI calculations, but needs to.
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Hi Gail. Your conclusions in this article are no surprise. As usual, the research is thorough and sobering. As you know, many in the climate change activist community hold out the hope for a transition to a renewable energy society as an alternative to continuing reliance on fossil fuels, which are rapidly changing the atmosphere. Folks who are familiar with your work and the peak oil community in general recognize that our current patterns of energy use cannot be maintained with renewable energy, but do not go into detail generally about the potential scope of the gap. Some, like James Kunstler or John Michael Greer, are more forthright about the contraction, but this goes to a small audience. Many who are aware turn to individual prepping in contrast to community level responses. Do you have any suggested policy proposals? Perhaps you’ve already addressed them in previous posts. If so, a review of what’s possible might be helpful.
Also: Nafeez Ahmed distributed the link to a fall 2016 HSBC report predicting that US shale oil production would soon go into decline, and would no longer be able to mask overall world crude depletion, leading to supply disruptions that would be impossible to hide after 2017. This aligns with some of your recent articles. Do you see any useful way for groups like Post Carbon Institute or ASPO to bring up the HSBC report, prepare for teachable moments, and call for sensible policy responses? Thanks!
I”ll chip in, although JMG is being hated over here for some reason, his credo of “collapse now avoid the rush” is one of the few things little people can do. For example, if you now curtail your expenses by %% (energy, food and other bills) you will obviously greatly benefit (at least in temporary fashion) in scenarios of inflation spike and or interrupted/unreliable services. Because your dependency base will be lower than for the average spoiled pop around you. For many theoretical doomers it doesn’t matter much going down hungry and cold, but in sober reality it’s always more convenient to watch the ultimate fireworks with something small, yet warm in the belly.
In terms of policy responses, that’s a tough one. Perhaps support regional oriented, de-centralized measures as available on case by case basis if that makes a bit sense. In total, frankly, the legacy system now is way beyond corrective input.
“In terms of policy responses, that’s a tough one. Perhaps support regional oriented, de-centralized measures as available on case by case basis if that makes a bit sense. In total, frankly, the legacy system now is way beyond corrective input.”
I agree. Individualism is overrated. And although you’ll want to give up when facing the wall of incomprehension in your local community, it’s an interesting challenge to keep trying to get through. Sharpens the skills. You’re alone. Expect no help. So what? Prepares you for death.
But a straightforward way to look at community planning is this: whatever you succeed in doing in one community must spread (like capitalism, to give an example) or else decline. It can’t stand still on its own. It, too, must grow or collapse. But I say, start where you live.
“collapse now avoid the rush”
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/f2/36/b6/f236b63e838dbbade099ccee170164b4.jpg
In aggregate there must have been multitude of ancestors in your lineage, who put that motto into work and survived occasional bottleneck events, otherwise you would not have even appeared on this world, smarty pants..
Again, I’m not claiming now it is just yet another bottleneck to navigate through..
If you have a death wish then sure — hope for near-term collapse.
If the problem is low prices rather than high, I am not sure it helps, though. It is the suppliers that collapse.
Perhaps better to keep the system going with more debt.
I answered your email. I don’t have a lot of good solutions. Don’t waste money on things that don’t work, like wind and solar PV.
Did you know …. that when you manufacture a solar panel …. you use roughly the same amount of energy (produced by dirty coal)… as you will get out of the panel over its life time?
And if you add a batter pack and invertor and the rest of the gear…. you actually use more energy than you will get out of the system.
Yes – really!
Did you know before you drive a Tesla off the lot you have already burned 80,000 miles worth of carbon — because it is very energy intensive to make the battery pack.
Petrol cars burn roughly 1/5th that amount….
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/19/tesla-motors-dirty-little-secret-is-a-major-proble.aspx
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324128504578346913994914472
I struggle with the term renewable…. how is a solar panel considered to be producing renewable energy … when in fact it produces no energy whatsoever?
Should it not instead be called a battery? A battery that is charged up using coal fired electricity power plants?
Continuing the high use of fossil fuels is to quicken the degradation of the biosphere from the resulting pollutants. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, unless, of course, humans relearn how to live without it. Oh yes, plenty of space for people to grow most of their own food, but the cities would have to be decanted, free movement immigration allowed, and the complete dismantling of the economy of scale.
Can humans do it? Yes!
Slim chance of all that happening though. Here’s hoping for dystopia over total global biosphere (to economic) collapse.
So you believe abandoning the cities and letting people loose into the wilderness to grow food can work? All 7 billion of us free to cut down trees? Assuming we would quickly acquire the requisite skills, how does that help your biosphere?
In past centuries people were burning with ~90% eff. large mass stoves (300-600kg easily, ~10m channels of heat transfer), for the small-midsized variant, that’s roughly +5-6kg wood per one cycle/day. Plus they had cattle inside the incorporated barn under one roof, so gaining additional heat.
And guess what, despite all that great efficiency the forest were almost all gone even with fraction of today’s population (well to be correct wood was used also for other industrial processes not only heating homes). The current return of deep forests is largely an effect of the past ramp up of higher grade fossil fuels, so trees were not that much needed, plus the active subsidized replanting program. Obviously, very different story in 3rd world hell holes..
Era of Overexploitation (1850-1899)
This era was one in which the North American continent was transformed from a land mass with vast areas unsettled or even unexplored by Europeans to one with cities and farms scattered everywhere and held together by a spidery network of railroads, roads, and telegraph wires. It saw the sudden settlement of the West Coast (catalyzed by the discovery of gold in California), the Civil War, the disappearance of eastern forests, an enormous influx of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the vast expansion of industry and technology. This increase in human population, combined with the technology of the early industrial era and the demands of a market economy, caused wildlife populations to plummet from a combination of unchecked exploitation and environmental alteration. Some examples:
The vast migratory herds of bison on the Great Plains were systematically slaughtered or died of cattle-borne diseases until only a few hundred individuals were left.
The passenger pigeon, whose numbers were once reckoned to be in the billions, became extinct in the wild. Both adults and young were harvested commercially. The last bird died in captivity in 1914.
Heron and egret populations were decimated by hunters shooting them in their breeding colonies for plumes for ladies hats.
The ranges of large predators such as grizzly bears, mountain lions, and wolves became greatly reduced. Mountain lions and wolves were virtually eliminated from eastern North America, as were grizzly bears from California.
White-tailed deer became extremely scarce in the eastern United States through a combination of habitat loss and over-hunting.
Runs of salmon and shad disappeared from many eastern rivers, their runs blocked by mill dams or killed by factory wastes in combination with unlimited fishing.
http://marinebio.org/oceans/conservation/moyle/ch2-2/
AMERICA
In 2011, gun owners in the United States outnumbered hunters by 5 to 1.
There were 13.7 million hunters in the United States over age 16 — 12.7 million of whom used rifles, shotguns or handguns for hunting, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
That means hunters constituted only 15.9 to 18.1 percent of the estimated 70-80 million gun owners in the U.S. in 2011 — the latest year for which statistics are available.
In a Dec. 28 national report, USF&W said 13.7 million individuals over age 16 self-identified as hunters, and that 12.7 million used guns (shotguns, rifles or handguns) while hunting.
Another 2.9 million hunters used antique muzzleloaders to hunt, but according to USF&W, there is overlap between this figure and other figures due to self-reporting.
Around 4.5 million hunted with bows and arrows.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), meanwhile, estimates there were between 70 and 80 million American gun owners as of January 2011.
CANADA
The estimated number of firearms (legal and illegal) in the hands of civilian owners in Canada is about 10 million
Attention Would Be Grizzly Adams! Attention Preppers!
When The Famine hits — wildlife is going to be wiped out in very short order.
When The Famine hits — barnyard animals are going to be wiped out in very short order.
When The Famine hits —- and the bullets start to fly — whatever wildlife survives the onslaught is going to scamper into the deepest remote bush as far from humans as possible — forget about chasing them down on your quad — there will be no petrol for that.
Someone wrote about the effectiveness of pollardinjg and coppicingh to provide wood without killing the trees. Apparently, it’s a centuries old approach and I don’t know why it didn’t serve to preserve forests. I also must look up when cardboard began to be manufactured at scale. I believe it can replace wood in many instances.
When billions are cold and hungry — I don’t imagine the first thing that will occur to them would be cutting trees in a manner that will ensure new growth years down the line.
But first they must contend with the dictators.
“The first corrugated cardboard box manufactured in the USA was in 1895.[17] By the early 1900s, wooden crates and boxes were being replaced by corrugated paper shipping cartons.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_box
Pollarding/coppicing I guess it’s a good method to have some spare wood supply for grill party the other weekend or family sized bread oven put to work once/twice weekly, but the bottom line remains if used for real space heating in tonnage/y, it’s just unwanted degradation of soils, which should be rather used for food instead..
Expensive and high tech, but the basic principles of passive heating should be transferable to less expensive and less tech alternatives. (Adobes built historically by Native Americans in my state can have super thick walls that insulate well.)
I am sure that it takes energy to manufacture cardboard from wood. We have all kinds of cheap substitutes for wood now–particle board, for example.
coppicing is the use of the energy contained in the tree root to continually thrust up new growth as old shoots are harvested
I dont know enough about coppicing to say how long that could go on, but it obviously has limits.
The system was extensively used for charcoal making for iron
But as it takes 1000 tons of tree=100 tons of charcoal=1 ton of iron, you can see its limitations.
Yes. I know. I gather from OFW–but it’s something I’v e considered for decades–that a world order of the present complexity and population density can’t work. FW has made it clear that the resulting over complexity requires an unsustainable amount of energy to run in a top down, networked manner. Everything I ever say starts from that premise.
Such schemes have obviously not been thought through.
Amazingly … I recently met the rarest of animals … someone who actually understands the situation we are facing…
Someone who’s primary reason for moving to New Zealand was hope that this country offered a potential refuge from death — someone who has since realized the futility of it all.
This person is a European trained in the science of wine making — she is the operational head of a significant wine production company.
I was discussing organic wine making with her …. and I raised the question of converting industrial farmed vineyards to organic….
‘That would take many many years of intensive organic soil inputs in order to grow anything in soil that has had chemical fertilizers applied’
So that rules out growing anything on 99% of all agricultural land.
Keep in mind a great deal of agricultural land has been reclaimed from the dust bin by BAU powered irrigation methods….
As for heading into the bush to grow things …. that is ridiculous…. if the bush was suitable for growing it would have been cut down and farmed already…
Further — where would these billions get seeds for growing this food?
What would these billions eat while they wait for the first crop?
The famine to end all famines is headed your way along with epic violence…. followed by plumes of radioactivity.
The Perfect Storm.
Make sure you have your escape plan in place. At some point you will want to end the suffering.
Fast E-
I’m just coming in from a day of dragging, crosscut sawing and spitting wood, a bit of the FE challenge;-) I know you hate hope but I still think I could make it if were not for the radiation. In any case, we are having a really mild winter here in the Maritimes and it is good to see you posting again.
That’s wonderful! Did you drag the trees by hand out of the bush?
I just finished 4 hours of heavy going the garden.
I am now washing my clothes in the washing machine — I took a hot shower with hot water from the electric water heater (I have a gravity feed so no pump necessary) I just pulled some food from the fridge (most of it bought from a shop which I drove to using my vehicle) and cooked it on the gas fired stove…. I tore a big hole in my jeans which my wife will repair using the electric sewing machine…
All in all it’s been a good day
Now imagine how all that would change if the power went off permanently.
Why not give it a try instead of regaling us with tales of chopping wood? You are perhaps 5% into the Fast Eddy Challenge.
Go whole hog. No electricity – no petrol – no buying anything in a shop.
I await your report!
Lol, I know it will be hard for you to hear it but I did drag them by hand. I’ve got more seals than I can shake a stick at in front of the house. You really need to come up for a visit and we can have a nice feed of seal meat over the dim candle light of rendered seal fat candles;-)
I’d really like to go for a harder FE challenge but Mrs Banana already thinks I’m nuts.
How long do you think the seals will last when you and your neighbours start blasting away at them with rifles?
Don’t you think that people in nearby towns and cities will head to where they believe food to be and start blasting away too?
Relatively few men decimated most big game across Canada in a short period of time — without nearly the firepower that is available now….
From my experience with killing animals —- when you shoot at them — they tend to not return to the kill zone — they get as far away as possible.
I would imagine that seals will not return to your front yard if you waste a few of them.
Likewise with other game…
Joe – why don’t you just take the Challenge? Are you reluctant to give it a go because you know that your bubble will burst?
I really not interested in your seal hunting plans…. or your chopping wood….
That’s like you telling me you can skate backwards and insisting that you can play for the Montreal Canadians….
Fast-
You cranky old upper Canadian, I get it, we are going to die, die, die! Don’t take it so seriously if I want to be on the end of the list. We are the same age, and I could be regaling you with tails of getting as much wood as what I chop;-) I mention wood processing here because there might be someone who considers it valuable.
For the last time, I’m not worried about people from Toronto or Halifax coming here to shoot my seals or steal my wood, or fish my fish or do anything because city people are dead people walking. When the financial system goes down it is over. Anyone who lives in a city is dead at any time. I am far from them.
The people who decimated the animals of North America did it with the help of fossil power industry and huge energy supplies. Im sorry old sock but you just don’t read like you know much about hunting.
I’ve only spoke in theory of survival as I accept your thoughts on radiation. If there was no radiation I think people could survive no problem. Yea, 90% would be dead but the rest would make it. How is it that my ancestors landed here on the shoreline I sit on and made a life for themselves with nothing but a few hand tools?
God Bless you Fast.
Yet you refuse to take the Challenge….
Fast-
Honestly can’t figure out what the challenge is because no matter what anyone says you say it is not enough. I’m thinking…can of beans, no underwear, and a stick. Run into the woods in Canada and come back in six months? I go do that and you say the beans were BAU so no pass.
God Bless you Eddy
It’s very simple…
Let’s pick a time frame – say one month.
During that period you cannot use electricity – you cannot use petrol — you cannot walk to a shop and buy anything — let’s throw another wrinkle in…. you cannot use a lighter or matches (these will run out post BAU so you may as well get some practice in lighting a fire by rubbing sticks together)
No cheating — you wash your clothes by hand — you cook on a fire — if you run out of food in the cupboard you need to kill or gather what you eat…
Not really plenty of room for people to grow their own food. Without our current system, we could only feed a small fraction of our current 7.5 billion people.
Rick – it is very doable — although if you are not already doing it — then it could prove a challenge….
http://previews.123rf.com/images/surz/surz1401/surz140100334/25323158-PAPUA-IRIAN-JAYA-ASMAT-INDONESIA-JANUARY-18-Asmats-headhunters-and-woodcarver-in-traditional-and-nat-Stock-Photo.jpg
I wonder how those fellows will make out when they have to manage 4000 of these… without electricity!
Perhaps they can pray to the spent fuel god to stay cool…. perhaps even sacrifice some virgins….
https://coto2.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/3-spent-fuel-rods-in-pool1.jpg
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603531/tesla-just-added-a-huge-stack-of-batteries-to-the-california-power-grid/?set=603536
Strange, nowhere has an AC power grid ever been run on IRE (intermittent renewable energy — wind, solar, tides, etc.), nor has commercial artificial photosynthesis (to produce fuels from sunlight) happened.
5000 cycles won’t be nearly enough. Look at the kind of spikes, and the frequency of spikes, that Euan Means is showing in his post. http://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-adding-different-types-of-renewables-smooths-output/
The problem is that the spikes get worse and worse, and you add more and more renewables. They don’t smooth out.
Thank you, Gail, for exploring a new topic. Perhaps solars systems have a niche…in small systems.
Back in the 90s attended a night class in such by an individual that was the head of a group which provided light used systems to countries, like Chile, in the rural countryside, where the grid was absent. Not much, maybe light or a fan, small pump, ect….but made a world of difference to their lives.
Here in the United States, I look at the low hanging fruit of solar and that is even a non starter for the most part
United States has some of the best solar resources in the world, but solar made up only 0.4 percent of U.S. energy supply in 2014. The main barrier to widespread implementation has been the relatively high initial investment; however, costs have been decreasing in recent years.
Solar water heaters can reduce conventional energy consumption for heating water by 60 percent in commercial applications and up to 75 percent in homes. Although initial home installation costs range from $1,500 to $3,000—at least double that of conventional heaters—the reduction in gas or electric bills realized over their 15-20 year lifespan allow solar water heaters to equal or better the long term cost of other water heaters.
http://www.eesi.org/topics/solar/description
Here in the USA, our culture and expectations, values collide with the long term.
In the South, where most of the population growth has occurred in the last decades,
Solar heating of hot water works quite well, especially in areas where freezing is not a problem. There is no intermittency problem. This could easily be expanded. I wasn’t really talking about solar heating of hot water in this post.
Intermittent solar, put on the electric grid is the problem.
I agree that there may be some places where intermittent solar is appropriate on a limited local basis, mostly for a few lights and to charge cell phones. It is hard to operate a manufacturing business, using intermittent solar. It is not possible to pave a road using intermittent solar. So it has severe limitations as to how much can be expected. Once the batteries wear out and can’t be replaced, it won’t be able to used for lighting at night, but it still can be used to charge a cell phone (assuming a cell phone transmitting tower is still available and working).
Great post Gail
The renewable crowd is a religion as other posts have commented. But it’s based on the promises of politicians. Just like the ones elected in Greece. The entire renewable energy systems breath of life is the surplus energy of fossil fuels. This is derived by the subsidies granted them by the political priests of their religion who obtained their power from the taxes they acquired from fossil fuel production and consumption.
Technology is the doctrine used to confuse and stupify the masses into believing the power actually came from a renewable source rather then the fossil fuels underpinning the entire system.
If we step back from the lens of renewable technological dogma and take a close look at human achievement what do we see. Why don’t we have lunar landers any more? Why don’t we have supersonic passenger flight? Why have the current technologies become smaller and less energy intense that are used to keep us distracted? Why is the nuclear program at a low eb if it’s a net producer rather then net energy sink?
We might simply say humans are opportunistic. When there is no fire we eat sushi. Give us wood we cook our food and limit the supply we build a stove. Give us coal we build a coal cooker. Give us oil an oil cooker. Gas a gas cooker. Electric an …. well I think we see the pattern here. But when we have all this at the same time?? Men now live like gods and they aren’t likely to surrender that status without a fight. But has it been any great achievement that got him here? Not really many men worshipped the sun over the coarse of human history. Maybe that doesn’t seem so foolish now. I believe the sun will be in its assigned location thousands of years from now. Will today’s gods?
I think you have the story right. Politicians had to have something to promise. Wind and solar looked as good as anything else. And academics didn’t understand that they had to draw the boundaries of the models bigger.
Hi Gail,
Is the variability of hydroelectric output a matter of supply or demand? It’s not clear from your graphs and analysis what is driving the variation.
I would imagine that the power output could be ramped up or down to meet demand, so the variability shown in the graphs isn’t necessarily due to availability of water behind the dam (I’m sure there’s a term for that, “head”?), could it not be driven by demand?
Love your blog, keep up the great work!
I thought the same.
Whatever is the dispatchable source WILL vary after demand. Until the blackout hydro will have been limited by demand.
There are really two parts to hydroelectric output. One is the rain that comes down from the sky, together with the melted snow that is made available. These set the dynamics for what those operating the dam can do. In the spring, they are likely going to be almost forced to make hydroelectric output, to keep the amount of water behind the dam manageable. I know that wind operators in the Northwest were unhappy at least one year when dam operators told them, “Sorry no wind for now, we have to take the water from the snow melt.”
When the amount of water becomes manageable, a little water can be let out from time to time, to top off the supply of other power produced from other sources. This is what Matt Mushalik showed recently, for part of Australia, during one day. It is easily controlled, from behind the dam, at this point.
http://crudeoilpeak.info/wp-content/uploads/NSW_generation_by_type_24Jan2017.jpg
If it is a dry season, the number of times that water can be let out for topping off purposes is severely limited before the water behind the dam, available for this purpose runs out. Then it is simply not available.
If a dam is located in a very wet area that doesn’t have many snow capped mountains, such as Germany, perhaps hydroelectric is available on a fairly steady basis all year long. Otherwise, it seems to vary quite a bit more. Norway, Sweden, Finland and Sweden have such small populations that the hydro seems to be able to handle quite a bit of their needs. Also trees in Finland.
Strange that Euan Mearns should come out with a very different piece on the same topic and come to similar conclusions on the very same day.
“Green Mythology: adding different types of renewables smooths output”
http://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-adding-different-types-of-renewables-smooths-output/
You need to actually read the article. Euan says:
Euan is saying exactly the same thing that I am!
I did not explain myself well. Euan is saying exactly the same thing using very different words.
Very interesting thanks for sharing it supports the argument very well.
Hey, cool! Canada is currently the leader in hydro!
That, and the tar sands, must make us very attractive for the coming Anschluß.
I know I have seen proposals to replace the nuclear power lost from closing Indian Point Nuclear Plant (near NYC) with Canadian hydro.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20110707/replace-indian-point-nuclear-powe-new-york
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/nyregion/indian-point-nuclear-power-plant-shutdown.html
Only problem Canadian hydro would require a transmission line and no one wants one in their back yard. In twenty years of trying no new transmission line in the Hudson Valley.
Bury the lines underground! I understand that Germany has found it necessary to go the underground route, at least on some of its transmission lines. This article seems to suggest that burying the lines comes close to tripling the cost.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-09/germany-to-build-11-billion-power-link-as-cost-estimate-doubles
Long distance power lines expose very large communities to catastrophic loss of power from the transmission lines being taken out for whatever reason.
e.g. “During the Mozambican Civil War (1977–1992) the transmission lines were sabotaged to the extent that 1,895 towers needed to be replaced and 2,311 refurbished over a distance of 893 km on the Mozambican side of the line!”
Wow! Or hurricanes can bring transmission lines down.
As an Aussie, I’ve followed the South Australian outage issue closely. It was quickly shown that the problem wasn’t renewables but the physical collapse of powerline towers. Politicians jumped in to damn renewables for their own purposes.
On the storage of renewables issue… You might find Chris Goodalls recent book The Switch interesting. He posits storing renewable energy as converted hydrogen in gas pipelines for winter use.
If Australia continues along the solar path …. here is what will happen:
Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables
Even as Germany adds lots of wind and solar power to the electric grid, the country’s carbon emissions are rising. Will the rest of the world learn from its lesson? After years of declines, Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs. That’s happening because even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/
Germany’s Expensive Gamble on Renewable Energy : Germany’s electricity prices soar to more than double that of the USA because when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind does not blow they have to operate and pay for a completely separate back up system that is fueled by lignite coal http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602
Why Germany’s nuclear phaseout is leading to more coal burning
Between 2011 and 2015 Germany will open 10.7 GW of new coal fired power stations. This is more new coal coal capacity than was constructed in the entire two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The expected annual electricity production of these power stations will far exceed that of existing solar panels and will be approximately the same as that of Germany’s existing solar panels and wind turbines combined. Solar panels and wind turbines however have expected life spans of no more than 25 years. Coal power plants typically last 50 years or longer. At best you could call the recent developments in Germany’s electricity sector contradictory. https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-germanys-nuclear-phaseout-is-leading-to-more-coal-burning/
Recall around ~2013-14 fortunes were made when few analyst discovered/called the German fraud on renewables upswing commitment to be supposedly continuing, incl. phase out of coal and nuclear plan. So they front-loaded the markets in buying the coal in the ditch. German worker is now paying x prices.. screaming bloody murder, good payback time for such unconstrained blind faith and love in their fuhrerin .. lolz
ps there won’t be calm in Europe, before return to the pre Bismarck times,
i.e. split of Reich into separate regions of Bavaria, Rhine, Prussia, .. again.
Germany is a perfect example of:
http://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/6/65/1471632042-quote-only-two-things-are-infinite-the-universe-and-human-stupidity-and-i-m-not-sure-about-the-former-albert-einstein-56412.jpg
Hmm, I thought cracking H2 from water yielded very little (if any) surplus energy? Making H2 from methane gives surplus but where does the methane come from? I don’t agree with the ‘curl up + die’ philosophy but we do need to keep pointing out the flaws with any alternative to fossil fuels, which will disempower &/or annoy some people.
Talking of bigger pictures, even if we did crack energy, there’s food production which is heavily dependent on FFs, + all the petrochemicals we seem to need. We have to consume less, waste less, want less! The economy will deflate but I doubt we will orchestrate the deflation. As Colin Campbell said, change will be imposed by nature.
There is a significant sticking point to the promotion of thorium as the ‘great green hope’ of clean energy production: it remains unproven on a commercial scale. While it has been around since the 1950s (and an experimental 10MW LFTR did run for five years during the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, though using uranium and plutonium as fuel) it is still a next generation nuclear technology – theoretical.
‘Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.’
In fact, a 2010 National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) report (PDF)concluded the thorium fuel cycle ‘does not currently have a role to play in the UK context [and] is likely to have only a limited role internationally for some years ahead’ – in short, it concluded, the claims for thorium were ‘overstated’.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/23/thorium-nuclear-uranium
If it really worked, I expect that something more would have happened with it.
It may have been “quickly shown” that the problem wasn’t renewables but the physical collapse of powerline towers, but that is not what the investigative report said. The report is coming out in parts, and the last part won’t be until out until April.
I got my information from the investigative report. This is an ABC news story about the report. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-12/renewable-energy-mix-played-role-in-sa-blackout/8111184 Another related story, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-12/power-grid-in-need-of-multi-billion-dollar-upgrade:-report/8111468
So a tornado took out an interconnect, and due to the isolated segment having a large amount of wind power, problems?
The solution?
The AEMO has subsequently ordered that two major gas-fired power stations remain online at all times in South Australia to keep the grid in a secure operating state.
If you have to have conventional power plants running at all times, there go your “renewable” savings?
It seems this is a perfect example of “complexity” throwing a monkey wrench in the “renewable” gameplan.
They also need to build a very expensive interconnector.
Part of their problem, as I recall, was that coal fired plant could not make money with the goofy pricing structure that renewables cause.
Last coal-fired power generator in South Australia switched off (May 9, 2016)
Already German industry is bitching about high electricity prices due to the above-mentioned issue…. threats of moving operations have been made
What amazes me is that it seems that nobody anticipated this problem — nobody realized the sun does not shine at night and the wind does not always blow….. nobody realized that people and business wood demand electricity all the time….. nobody concluded that for this to happen two power generation systems would have to be used….
In spite of this massive disaster — other countries continue down the same path
Idiocracy has arrived!
Thanks Gail! Just one comment. Using electricity ‘directly’ for heat is not the way to go if you ask the heat pump manufacturers.
It gets more complicated, but for an upfront investment you get higher efficiency. You also get a pump replacement problem.
Yes, correct we discussed it here occasionally.
The major contribution of heat pumps is obviously the leverage, multiplication factor you can apply on your feeding source be it grid, PV, natgas/biomass genset, wind, etc. So suddenly, if you look at Gail’s graph, they could be elevated by factor of 3-4x, and the energy can be stored for weeks in say average 1-2k liters accu tanks.
The problem is with cost, the heat pump system goes for ~ $15k installed per family unit, longevity roughly two decades, some parts could soldier on longer. On the face of it, that’s not a large sum, HOWEVER, the legacy cultures of ours, aka “past decisions/mistakes” have sunk huge amounts of capital-debt into frivolous stupidities like gargantuan carz, holidayz, too large houses and what have you, among other things (war machine, rents for capital-debt owners etc). So in reality even paltry ~$15k is today out of reach for most.. and some theoretical gov crash program to subsidize it for everybody from now on is also very unlikely.
In summary, yes it’s all unpleasant conundrum and predicament with no easy way out.
On personal level if conditions are right, you should do it (chopping undesired consumption first), the adverse effect obviously is that with such system you are becoming a big shining target for other “unfortunate peoplez” in times of alleviated scarcity..
Except that the heat pumps really only work where it is fairly warm. And energy.gov gives a whole lot lower multiplication factors than you claim.
I was thinking about when I visited China, and stayed for a month. Beijing is quite a bit colder than Atlanta in winter. I had two electric heating devices in my apartment. I think that they were not heat pumps–just plain heaters.
Sorry, it’s not “my claim”, perhaps mutual misunderstanding. You write about experience with air sourced heat pump, which is the least effective/oldest subcategory of heat pumps, nevertheless even current models (not the worst Chinese junk) from the entry level air-source domain, don’t have icing problems and the gain is above ~4x, people use them in -20C. There are few US brands available too, and the certified numbers (not mentioning real observed performance known for years) are higher than stated on some overview .gov site..
I suppose the other issue that may be affecting prices is that at least some of China’s heat in the past has come from co-generation. China is trying to close down coal plants in the middle of the city, including Beijing. Almost any type of heat, even electricity from a very efficient heat pump, would be more expensive than heat from cogeneration. The university was on a central heating system. I don’t know whether it was co-generation, or coal burned locally.
I don’t think that the article I quoted really said where the previous heat was from.
The heating units I had in my apartment in Beijing might have been the “Split-Ductless Heat Pumps” shown with this buying guide. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/heat-pumps/buying-guide.htm I didn’t see the outside unit, but there could have been one. The inside unit was as shown, and near the ceiling, with a “remote control.” This guide says,
You are right. In fact, we have a heat pump for our basement. (We live near Atlanta, so are in a fairly warm area.) No one recommended one for upstairs. We have had problems with the basement one having problems with ice, when there are icy conditions outside.
I presume that the people installing the Chinese heaters looked into the heat pump possibility as well. One Energy.gov link says:
” When properly installed, an air-source heat pump can deliver one-and-a-half to three times more heat energy to a home than the electrical energy it consumes.”
If we need a factor of 2.6 to make up the efficiency loss, and we need to include the cost of the heat pump, it seems like we still come out behind.
This energy.gov site says:
My impression is that for most applications, they don’t really “do enough.” They need supplementation.
There are two upgrade levels up the very basic level heat pump system you described, where you gain as much by factor of ~4.6-5.7x depending on the certification methodology. I guess it’s still not that much popular or available in NA, try EU brands specialized vendors-installers instead.. From shaky memory there should be at least one US brand doing larger ~40kW units, beside that you can cascade individual units, so for example you like parameters of say 20kW unit, need 60kW, so you cascade 3x of them..
Gail-
Heat pumps are really popular in Nova Scotia. They became popular about 10 years ago and most new homes have them. Installers can barely keep up with retrofitting older homes. They work well here and save people a lot of money on heating costs.
Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top Google engineers
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables
Even as Germany adds lots of wind and solar power to the electric grid, the country’s carbon emissions are rising. Will the rest of the world learn from its lesson? After years of declines, Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs. That’s happening because even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/
Germany’s Expensive Gamble on Renewable Energy : Germany’s electricity prices soar to more than double that of the USA because when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind does not blow they have to operate and pay for a completely separate back up system that is fueled by lignite coal http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602
Why Germany’s nuclear phaseout is leading to more coal burning
Between 2011 and 2015 Germany will open 10.7 GW of new coal fired power stations. This is more new coal coal capacity than was constructed in the entire two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The expected annual electricity production of these power stations will far exceed that of existing solar panels and will be approximately the same as that of Germany’s existing solar panels and wind turbines combined. Solar panels and wind turbines however have expected life spans of no more than 25 years. Coal power plants typically last 50 years or longer. At best you could call the recent developments in Germany’s electricity sector contradictory.
https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-germanys-nuclear-phaseout-is-leading-to-more-coal-burning/
I see this article from October 2016,, Germany takes steps to roll back renewables energy revolution.
According to it:
Schalten Sie die blutigen Lichter! screamed Herr Richter to his son.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/euan-mearns-europe-electric-price.png
Breakthroughs in technology require vision and asking. http://biblehub.com/luke/11-9.htm
I have been praying every night for a private jet…. for many years now….
It’s not working….
I will say a prayer for thorium tonight…. perhaps god is not answering my jet prayer because he sees that as very selfish — whereas thorium will save the world
Apparently the Air Force was working on a something that would answer both your prayers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion
It was to use an uranum tetrafloride molten salt reactor, and it was the inspiration for the thorium reactor.
It only flew under conventional power, but it had a working reactor on board. In theory it would have had a rotating crew and flown for months, kinda like a nuclear sub in the sky…
Strange!
Fast Eddy It helps to know who you are asking and to be part of the family and what to ask for.
I’ve warned Eddy before about facing the wrong way at prayer time.
no wonder god ignores him—gives the rest of us a bad name too, the sin of association etc.
i think he spends too much time headbanging and not enough time bible thumping if you ask me.
Norman Pagett I think you mean “having the wrong attitude”. See King David. Otherwise headbanging could be a danger in the future.
yes Ive warned Eddy about his attitude—why only the other day I asked him to lend me some money—his attitude wasn’t what one would expect from a committed doomster at all.
I had figured out that if I borrowed money now, come doomsday it would be worth zilch—but he wasn’t buying that—not even on the security of a pound of my flesh.
Apparently he remains certain that jesus is returning any day now and bringing that learjet he covets so much.
Whereas I, in my poverty, can only covet my neighbours ass.
Still—it’s a very nice ass.
Caution! Both are serious problems that are answerable before the Supreme Judge. There is still time to turn back. Neither solve our future fuel problem.
while there’s plenty of sinners who drift in and out of here—we OFW “lifers” are mainly stonecasters, in fact that is what we do best—being inherently free of sin, and pure of heart
so we have no need to worry.
Well I don’t anyway—-I haven’t sinned since I can’t remember, certainly as far back as yesterday anyway,—i feel positively saintly right now after not sinning for that long. (miracles while u wait is a little sideline I make a bit of money on btw)
so that qualifies me as a stonecaster by anybody’s measure.
http://www.johnbarrettblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Jesus-Didnt-Hang-Out-With-Sinners.jpg
Fast Eddy
Far better that he ate and talked with them , was the life of the party, and asked them to follow him.
It’s Rubber Room Time here again on FW….
David — we have prepared a special room just for you!
https://www.govloop.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/USE-Rubber-Reduced-2-iStock_000016622863Large-1024×716.jpg
California requires Flexible Excess Capacity greater than the solar “Duck Curve” 3 hour ramp rate. http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Agenda-Presentation-FlexibleCapacityNeedsTechnicalStudyProcess.pdf
Blues for the Greenies:
Now matter how many greenbacks the government throws at “green” energy, everyone ends up feeling blue. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal updated the story we’ve been covering for a long time now about the dismal performance of the Brightsource solar energy array in the California desert:
High Tech Solar Projects Fail to Deliver – $2.2 Billion California Project Generates 40% of Expected Electricity
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/06/more-blues-for-the-greens.php
The particular problem here is that the initially claimed performance data were severely misrepresented, one of the early seeding founders Google jumped ship already in ~2011, they underestimated the sheer amount of natgas needed to start up and balance this thing in connecting it to the grid with unrealistic power generation %capacity promises. With all that bad press already, they had to cancel other similar CSP planned projects in the SE Cali desert area. The latest info from wiki is hilarious, they sold some smaller project to Chinese, announced moving out to Asia-ME and home state of Israel.
So in short story, the founder just made enough $ leaving bad taste and wasted $B of other peoplez money, certainly not the first or last profitable trickster on the planet, hah.
Sad!
This seems to be the continuing story. These panels were supposed to boil water to run generators, so that they could produce level power, during the day at least, but costs were misestimated and the cloud cover is more than expected. The cost of the electricity is quoted as 12 cents to 25 cents per kWH. The WSJ compares that (unfavorably) to the output from intermittent providers, at 5 cents per kWH, without realizing they are different. https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-to-deliver-1434138485
I am shocked to hear that a ‘renewable’ energy company would lie to investors.
Thanks! I suppose that part of the problem is,”Net-load is more variable than load itself and it increases as Variable Energy Resource production increases.” Thus, there is a tendency of the Duck Curve to get worse and worse over time, as more variable energy resources are added.
Gail Tverberg
Germany has seen renewables exceeding 100% of demand – ie export or shut down. Yet in mid winter solar + wind have died down to 3% of grid demand. France has winter peak greater then total generating capacity. Spain is also importing in winter. Now EU has to grapple with how to provide backup capacity to supply Germany, France AND Spain demand when solar/wind plumet to ~ 3% when load is highest in coldest winter with overcast. Have to provide sufficient financial incentives = return on investment to do so.
Actually, I think that there are smart inverters that can cut off tops of excessive wind/solar. That way neighbors don’t get as angry about fried transmission.They can also do a lot of other things. http://www.elp.com/articles/powergrid_international/print/volume-21/issue-5/features/smart-inverters-behind-the-meter-grid-allies.html http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/08/09/how-an-obscure-piece-of-technology-will-help-put-more-solar-on-the-grid/ Getting enough total production os a problem, when the pricing system is giving too low a price for backup generation. How about utility type pricing?
Gail,
“Rising debt can help as well, for a while, but this has limits.”
This statement only holds true for the issuer of the reserve currency dollar. And that “help” is about to disappear very soon.
Thank you for the excellent article,
Cathal Haughian
I am not talking particularly about government debt. I am talking about debt to buy cars, homes, and factories.
Also, the big growth bubbles of both China and Japan were financed by debt.
Publics works project financed by debt are often boondoggles, regardless of whether the country has the reserve currency.
Thanks
Perhaps we should pack it in now? I mean, the Tesla Powerwall. Never heard of that…
I think you don’t pay enough respect to the battery technology and complete vision of the Tesla Powerwall. How about smaller grids (less waste, no need for large retrofit) that connect homes with solar shingles and Powerwalls? Then connect that infrastructure at various points to ensure delivery when needed, but only when the solar system needs it.
Your point about needing a battery to last over months or years is important, but that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable accomplishment within a decade, given where batteries were a decade ago! And if your only other reasons for disregarding solar is storage and consistency, there are proposals to solve those problems on the table.
Grid loss is around 7%. That’s less than the round trip loss through a battery.
I don’t think you are seeing the big picture. Even given you are correct regarding battery technology and complete vision, storage and consistency are not the only reasons for disregarding solar. PV and batteries and their surrounding tech need fossil fuels. They need diesel to mine the minerals/materials/rare earths, and every day they need more as ores get poorer and deeper and in rockier ground. They need to be shipped vast distances, processed, and both of those current systems use massive amoutns of fossil fuels with no propsals to solve their high fossil fuel usage in site. Our roads that our trucks need to drive on and the very tires the cars/truck need to drive need vast amounts of fossil fueels to create/maintina (10 barrels of oil for tire?). You can’t smelt aluminum or forge steel with PV, you need fossil fuel/nuclear power for that (well hydro but hydro is self limiting so it doesn’t really work outside the places it does). So every step of the way, you need fossil fuels to design/build/install a complete solar system. Kinda funny when you think about it.
If you do the math, the amount of fossil fuels that would be needed to put a tesla in every driveway, a power wall in every house and enough PV to supply those powerwalls is staggering. As in not gonna happen.
Its great tech. Really nifty. But really expensive in real world energy measurements.
If there was a way to mine lithium with solar, transport/process/build/install all the products with solar, that might be something. But right now there isn’t, and that isn’t going to change with our current tech. Strato/Orbital solar might be a game changer, but right now those are just dreams on paper.
If you want to learn more about this check out EROEI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested
basically, without the high(er) EROEI of fossil fuels, Solar/PV and other green energy techs are not possible. It is even possible in some setups it takes more energy to create a solar system than it will return over its lifetime.
Sure solar/batteries have gotten better over the last decade. But even if they get twice as better in the next decade, it apparently still won’t be enough to support itself on its own.
The issue is the cost, both in money and materials, to actually make changes on the huge scale that would be needed. I expect that the CO2 emissions resulting from all of these changes would be a problem as well.
Trying to build smaller grids seems like a no-go as well, because we really need to keep our current grid operating. There are too many pieces of the total that depend on it. For example, gas stations all have electric powered pumps. If we lose this electricity, it is not possible to get the gas out of the pumps. Factories of all kinds depend on electricity from the grid. We do not have the money and materials to build multiple redundant grids that would reproduce what we are doing now with a single grid, in part because we would need to roughly double our material use–and the new material use would require digging huge amount of raw materials out of the ground, and installing them. Eventually, after 100% of the old grid is replaced, we could theoretically let the old grid fail–except that we would never get that far.
Part of our problem is that renewable resources are a long way from where they are needed. The dams in Washington and Oregon are providing electric power to California, for example. The wind turbines are a long ways from where the power is needed. Solar tends to cause huge spikes around noon, which is before grids really need very much power. They also tend to produce way too much, when little is needed (spring and fall weekends, for example). Hugely expensive long distance transmission lines are needed to even out this mess. These issues point in the direction of more interconnectedness in our current grid. Our current grid could really be thought of as mostly a lot of little local grids, with very little interconnectedness. This is not a point most people realize.
Agree, but the split on the “upper” network running centralized legacy infrastructure realm on one hand and “lower” home network of semi-islands running led lights, fridges, pumps, small tools, phevs is inevitable, actually we are already living in such nascent world, albeit the penetration is small.
How exactly this turbulent wedge will effect such coexistence further and timing issues is beyond our pay-grade or more importantly beyond our limited vantage point to correctly evaluate/extrapolate it all.
Let me stress again, I don’t offer it here as a solution, but more as an observation.
great article gail the last paragraph sent shivers down my spine ‘We need to understand where we really are,not live in a fairy tale world produced by politicians who would like us to believe that the situation is under control’.
At some point, it seems like the politicians would wake up to the fact that this approach is not working. Strange situation! There is a need for people to feel as if something is being done about our problems, no matter how little chance of success it really has.
Green energy is a religion.
It’s contemporaries include theoretical nuclear power plants that can run on spent fuels and thorium–despite the inability for these things “to scale” to global demand for energy, they attract people who strongly believe that their chosen theoretical energy source can scale to meet global demand for energy.despite the lack of evidence to support their claims.
My understanding after a bit of research on the subject is that the LFTR tech is sound, it works, it just needs the bugs/kinks worked out, and then to be scaled and ramped up. If we had done this in the early 70’s instead of cancelling the program, and had built out a generation or two of reactors, we might be in a different boat today. Apparently the capabilitiy is there, but the project was shut down for political reasons rather than technical. Let us say for the sake of argument this is the case, there still needs to be a massive amount of work done, a decade or two at least, to get a design/materials that can deliever on the low(er) cost energy promise. The ability to burnup all the current fuel in fuel pons is a nice touch. But even if this were to happen, there are other limits that are being pushed, the collapse of soils, oceans, aquifers, ecohabitats, climate, etc. If we were to solve our low cost energy issues, it seems we just kick the can down the road. And even if we had a workable proven design today with our current materials tech, we would need to build 50 reactors a year for 50 years to replace our current use of oil, which seems somewhat doable, if we had the time, but I don’t think you would be able to build complex things like reactors if society is collapsing to various degrees around you. Could we build 500 reactors a year in a crash Manhattan sytple project? Maybe if we all worked together, but that seems unlikely, America’s WWII economic/military buildup seems the exception not the rule when it comes to command economies.
Unlike solar and PV, thorium seems to be the real deal. Too bad we didn’t back it to the hilt when we had the chance back in the 70’s. China/India are going all in I understand, but have they even replicated the program we shutdown? The DOE is helping them (or was, not sure if that is going to continue with the new administration), but how much help they are getting/got is unknown. Again my understanding is a lot of the Thorium tech was lost/destroyed/not fully documented(aka in the scientists heads-who have almost all died by now i guess). We shall see, but Thorium just might be the miracle some think it is. It also just might be too late to the party to make much difference.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/#7480dc623a75
http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor/
Ah, if wishes were fishes and all that… Forbes…Thorium => bigger than fire. Lol…
It didn’t work then — it will not work now — and we are on the precipice.
Just accept that you will die shortly. It’s really not that bad once you come to terms with the fact that there is no way out.
It brings a sense of inner calm. And the good thing — everyone you have ever known or seen — dies around the same time.
And surely during your lifetime you have encountered some right SOBs that you wished would die painfully?
Well — your wish is going to come true.
It actually DID work then, as a pilot test program, and they were working on making it work better when the rug got pulled out from under them. It seemed to hold vast amounts of promise and we may even get a glimpse of what it can do before everything falls apart. I do agree we are on the precipice, but we may be here for longer than we think we will. Humans are nothing if not resilient. Also I just started watching this new reality TV show about a reality TV star that becomes president. I’d really like to see how many seasons it runs for. It has a 4 year contract right now, but you know reality, you never know when something crazy is gonna happen.
I’m not trying to say it will save the day, in fact I pretty much say even if it works even better than its most ardent supporters say it will, it still won’t save the day. Best case it it seems it can push the day a little further away. And I am calm, I was just trying to point out the irony, its possible we had some game changing tech in the 70’s and flushed it down the drain.
I used to have a bit of that attitude on occasion, but not now, it doesn’t seem healthy to hope for someone’s painfull demise, even if they deserve it, so I try to think positive thoughts, as difficult as that can sometimes be in today’s environment.
If I had a wish that could come true it would be for a Mr. Fusion. I would like to think if we could solve the energy problem, we could use the energy to solve the rest of our problems. I told you I like to think positive 🙂 But we would probably just kick the can down the road till Climate Change, Ocean Acidification, Topsoil Erosion, Bacteria Resistance, or some other issues or combination of issues got the Jubilee started that Mr. Fusion postponed. It seems a healthy world with an amount of humans that lived sustainably on it is just not possible given our evolution? Perhaps before we go we could bio-engineer a human species 2.0, that worries about the future enough to be able to solve the sorts of problems that seem posed to take us out, and put it into suspended animation to awaken after the earth has rejuvenated? Well at least if that doesn’t come true it would make a good movie script, you could proof read it and make sure the end of humanity scenes have enough realistic violence in them!
You need to protect yourself. Let the governments deal with thorium. I would strongly advise moving to Russia, Chinese coastline, Iran, Norway, perhaps Switzerland and pockets of South Africa.
Stay away from cities and densely populated inland areas with scarce resources. And the USA, the heart of the crisis, is going to be very dangerous.
I stopped working last June, spent six month with my family in Ireland and just moved to a tropical beach north of Macau. As far as I’m told, everything is in place to exit the Ponzi and there are signs the decision has been made. It’ll have to happen during the Summer so there’s little interruption to food supplies.
One weekend it’ll just end and financial systems rebooted. About everyone dying? No chance. The death will be concentrated in discreet places.
Just make sure you’re not a slave after the crash.
Cathal Haughian
http://www.beforethecollapse.com/about
@Cathal
Seem to be interesting books. Whats your practical suggestion to not end up a (more of a) slave after the crash/reset? How to preserve purchasing power an the like?
Go long sticks and sharp stones. You can pick them up very cheap at the moment.
Maybe, maybe not. I wouldn’t move to anyplace where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t fit in.
The only good option is to move to DelusiSTAN…. there will be solar and wind powered electricity on an intermittent basis…. organic food…. probably space solar and thorium… everyone will be polite … there will be no crime or poverty …. it will have everything that you need to Live the Good Life…..
This is really crazy stuff — right up there with Keith and the space solar madness
Quote:(((((we could use the energy to solve the rest of our problems.)))))
we require energy to perform work—ie, engage in employment which is in some way beneficial to ourselves and those around us.
but that employment requires a secondary stage…the production of ‘’stuff’’. ie— a purpose to that employment.
The blacksmith doesn’t waste time beating his hammer on a cold anvil (and calling it work)—he puts a red hot horseshoe between them. He sells the horseshoe, uses the money to buy food to give him the necessary energy to make more horseshoes.
Simple—but that essentially is how the economy of the world works.
Without horseshoes to make and sell, the blacksmith would not survive no matter how much energy he had available to hit the anvil.
when we discovered the leverage that was available in fossil fuels, we used it to magnify our work efforts, so that ”employment” took on thousands of different aspects, producing millions of ‘’things’’, rather than the few that had been utilised for the necessary aspects of survival (food production for instance).
Virtually all of those things we use in everyday life have their base origin and / or function in the continued availability of cheap surplus oil coal and gas.
Unlimited energy will not solve “the rest of our problems” because energy of itself will not supply the raw materials with which we make the things through which we find employment.
Norm, if you have unlimited energy, you can make phosphorous from transmuting sulfur in a reactor, which would be the more abundant element. it costs energy, but if it’s unlimited, you can do crazy things like that. we could also mine granite for its accessory apatite minerals, another source of phosphorous, if we had unimited energy. But, we have yet to unlock the nuclear energy genie, except for dirty fission reactors with limited U fuel.
as an evangelical procrastinator, “if” has always been a favourite word of mine
Ert,
There are a few assumptions made on this site that may not hold water:
1) No one was entirely sure what caused the crisis in 2008, even by the people that had anticipated it (incl. me)
2) This was because all decision makers were only experts in their niche, they couldn’t appreciate their know-how at the System level
3) This meant that the FED chairs , the rate setters, had no idea how the operational staff were affecting the interest rate AND the Central Bankers had no idea how the Financial systems were operating and vice versa. This was true for the entire system.
4) The economic profession had been co-opted (bought) by Wall Street but other actors didn’t know this
5) The above meant that the bail-ins happened, because no one was sure what would happen if the market behaved “freely”
6) That’s why 150 guys wrote The Philosophy of Capitalism so now we’re confident.
7) Up to mate, how you position yourself, I’m not going to tell you what to do. Those books tell you what you need to know and prepare accordingly, they’re cheap because there’s no profit motive.
8) I’m on this site because volume three ‘The Peasants have no Clothes’ is about Neo-Liberalism and Finite Resources. Almost finished and that’ll end with detailed advice.
Best,
Cathal
Based on your comments on FW — I can say with great confidence — that if given the choice between reading your books and a Danielle Steele novel …. I’d rather suffer through the latter…
You may want to read my article, Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.
Also, my 2008 article, Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008.
ItBegins says: “LFTR”…”Apparently the capabilitiy is there, but the project was shut down for political reasons rather than technical. ”
What were they and why were these political reasons so universal that almost all industrialized countries stopped development of LFTR reactors…including ones that one benefit the most from it such as Japan and Germany…
ItBegins says:” Again my understanding is a lot of the Thorium tech was lost/destroyed/not fully documented”
I can’t help but get a “Who Killed the Electric Car?” vibe from this statement. It sounds like a conspiracy theory. I know how much humans love the narrative of persecution when they want to convince someone of a just cause but can we drop the “narratives” here? I found no evidence for this claim.
I usually don’t argue with Noble Prize winners in Physics, when they talk about Physics:
Carlo Rubbia, a former director of the CERN laboratory who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics, described thorium as having “absolute pre-eminence” over all other fuels including fossil fuels and uranium, the metallic element that has driven reactors since nuclear first started powering public grids in 1956.
“In order to be vigorously continued, nuclear power must be profoundly modified,” Rubbia said at the Thorium Energy Conference 2013, held on the CERN campus here last week.
Rubbia pointed out that thorium leaves less long-lived waste than uranium, is far more plentiful and is resistant to weapons proliferation. He also noted that thorium is effective at safely breeding more fuel, and that it has a much higher energy content than uranium or fossil fuels, a characteristic that he said gives it “absolute pre-eminence…as a source of energy.”
I looked into Thorium / LFTR / DWR in 2013/14 and came to the same conclusion – it’s the only thing that can (in my opinion) move the energy picture forward.
Unfortunately the investments, even in China and India, seam very meager. I don’t even see a single digit billion investment into the development. Compared with the investments into renewables or diesel engine developments this looks like peanuts – especially in regard of Chinas capabilities and future problems.
The fact that so little is being invested in thorium …. at a time when trillions of dollars are flooding the planet looking for home runs….
Surely that must be a reflection on the viability of this technology….
Heck – how many hundreds of billions are blown on solar energy — when we know for a fact that when you add more solar power to your grid — you drive the price of electricity through the roof…
Yet the money pours into this stupidity….
Clearly thorium has been determined to be so incredibly stupid (exponentially more stupid than solar) that nobody will touch it
I hate to disagree, because I normally agree with most of what you have to say, but this will have to be an exception.
The circular reasoning of no one is investing in thorium theofore thorium is not worth investing in does not hold up to closer scruitiny, although it might work for many other cases. The gotcha here is someone has to throw billions of dollars a year at the problem for a years/decades to get it to work, to fine tune it, to solve the embritlement problem(s) (fast nuetrons seem to turn the metal reactor piping to swiss cheese rather quickly, and maybe there are issues with some gases from the reactions also causing issues/needing to be dealth with), the pyroprocessing issues (how to turn glassified fuel waste into a nice safeish fuel to feed into the reactor with the thorium and how to deal with other molten salt/fuel/waste issues), and the ability to deal with the smallish (compared to normal reactors) amount of highly radioactive waste. Not trival issues by any means. But not impossible either, from what I understand. Just think of it as a Manhattan project concept. I’m sure I’m missing parts of this equation but I think this covers the big picture. We were about to step up to the plate to do so, but the word came down that the powers that be (GE? some cabal? some dude tossed a coin? someones brother said this is the tech to go with?) that we were gonna go all in on fast breeder reactors (which we then canceled later, cause they had huge problems of their own, how ironic) and let the next generation/next step in liquid thorium reactor technology die on the vine, after spending a lot of time and money on it.
So now, you pretty much have to start from scratch, get to where we WERE almost 5 decades ago, then throw a huge pile of money and decades to get, in theory, some killer nuke tech that is melt down free, burns up its own waste, creates its own fuel(just salt/seed it with a little uranium/plutionum you grabbed from some nuclear waste we need to get rid of anyway) and maybe could have 100:1 EROEI for certain applications. In theory then you could have enough spare energy to create all the petroleum products you need from the Fischer–Tropsch process. Of course were this to happen, you then again go back to the list of everthing else that is going wrong with the planet independent of the Peak Oil. As has been said elsewere, were we to have unlimited energy today, we would probably still extinguish ourselves shortly due to overpopulation/overshoot/over utilization of various finite resrouces rather than wisely setup a system that is sustainable.
While you development better solar panels/solar tech you can use the tech you have to get some power, whilst you improve effeciency, lower costs, and simply mfg. Thorium has no such luck. It’s decades and billions/trillions, before you get much of any return, no sane buisness is going to take that risk, and even governments are dipping their toes in the water and slowly ramping up. The problem with the trillions of investment dollars looking for a home today is they all want a return next week/next year, not next decade.
So I guess it might as well not work, because it would take money and time we don’t have to get it to the point for it to be able to help. So I guess a better analogy would be Thorium is so brillant its stupid, kinda like an idiot-savant that can do all sorts of fancy maths in its head instantly, but can’t cross the street without getting hit by a truck. Both not much use in the real world, but given the right circumstances, they could be/have been game changers.
Maybe so. But thorium reactors are not in widespread use now. I don’t think that it quite does enough.
I could take your word for this — or you could provide references for these comments.
Can you demonstrate that thorium every generated net energy?
If so – did it not occur to you that Big Oil — which is headed for bankruptcy — might not think to purchase this technology and roll it out big time?
Why would not the KSA include this in the post oil plan?
http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-only-two-things-are-infinite-the-universe-and-human-stupidity-and-i-m-not-sure-about-the-former-albert-einstein-56412.jpg
Thorium never made it out of the testing stage, but had viable plans to do so, as per the people working on it at the time. The plan was to do exactly what you ask, build a full scale, production, net energy plant as a test bed, then roll em out. Before that happened, but as they were drawing up the plans, politics. They apparently focused on its then weaknesses (which were to be solved in theory in the next generation of tech) and ignored its positivies to kill the program and put the money towars other nuke tech. Which was then killed itself.
I’m not sure if you are saying it was stupid to shut the program down in the first place or stupid to think it can save the day now, or its stupid to believe in super duper nuke tech that seems to have almost no downsides. In any event I only agree with the first stupids, but given the long time/cost needed to solve its issues, I’ll give you a “might as well be” on the third. Even if the tech is viable, it seems too late to the party to do anything, without some sort of (global?) command economy effort.
So there is no tech to purchase today, and to get the tech to the level it needs to be at to be able to deliver would take billions/trillions and years/decades.
If you are interested, there are a bunch of youtube videos, lookup Kirk Sorenson, he does a few, there are others, that goes over a lot of this. He and others interview some of the old timers who built the nuke tech of the 50s/60s and said this stuff was the bees knees, and explain this tech that appears to have many upsides and few downsides(other than being technically complex to do). The people that built the nuke tech we currently use wanted to do this, and were stopped. They thought it would work. Apparently you can still go to Oak Ridge and look at the documents they have on the subject. Wether you want to believe them and all that is another issue. I have enough basic physics to be able to follow some of the maths, but start with a bit of Ur or Pl, to transmute the Th into fuel. Once going, it makes its own fuel out of Th. And will burn up just about any nuclear waste you toss into it. It produces a very small amount of short lived waste of its own. Operate at high temperature low pressure for small cost effective construction and high thermal effciency No need for espensive huge concrete containment systems. No need for expensive huge redudnant fail safe cooling/power systems. Rather than melting down, it turns it self off if it gets too hot. You can have designs you have to actively cool or they will safely shut themsevles down. And then can be (easily) restarted. Use the on site waste heat for certain industries that current need ff to operate (aluminum,steel,liquid fuels,fertilizers,etc). Make fuel for then industries (mining) or build small on site reactors for that. A few dozen / hundred plants could power the country, a few thousand the world. With enough fuel for millions of years. We throw the fuel out ever time we mine rare earths. It is sitting around in tailings piles all over the planet. How’s that for stupid…
Maybe you are saying we are stupid cause we had the solution to the energy problem and threw it away for another shiny bauble that was to allow us to have more nuke building material (prob why they got rid of it, not so good if you want to build a lot of nuke weapons whereby fast breeders would let you do almost nothing but…). That I would agree with.
But I also agree with others. Let’s say the Thorium fairy hands us all the tech secrets tomorrow and we build hundreds/thousands of plants for all the energy we need to operate our current system. Would we wisely scale down to something sustainably? No, we would just keep going till we hit other limits. We are the yeast in the petri dish.
Maybe if we slow collapse over a decade and the powers that be go illumianti global command economy (when they and everyone else realise malthus is correct *this* time?) we can build enough of these fast enough to save us from full collapse, then use that energy to transform the planet into a stable system and clean up its problems? (scrub the air, clean the ocean, dispose of all the waste properly). How likely is that future? Seems very remote, but perhaps the chance of life starting on this planet was remote to begin with? Maybe we get to Kunsler/Geer’s low tech/sustainable visonary worlds after all? Humans are anything if resilient, but this time we may have bitten off more than we can chew. In any event even if that does happen I’m sure it won’t be easy or without much suffering.
I used to be much more posisitve on Thorium/Fusion saving the day, but now I just keep thinking back to bread and circuses. Is the MMA octagon the modern hippodrome? Nascar/F1 the modern day chariot races? Video/Infotainment the modern day circus? Is Neil Postman correct, will we truly entertain ourselves to death? It certainly appears to be looking that way, as disturbing a concept as that is.
It seems evolution didn’t bestow on us the tools to survive what we have become/built. Long term wasn’t necessary on teh savannah, so instead we can focus like a laser on the moment, but the future not so much. It helped/got us to where we are today, but it looks like we won’t have the time/chances to devlopment the ability as a species to live sustainably in what we have created.
Stupid – as in when you have determined that something is not feasible you continue to pour good money after bad….
Solar is the poster child for this.
Thorium is obviously exponentially more stupid — so stupid that not even the stupid people who fund solar are willing to fund this nonsense…
Even the German and Norwegian governments — who their donkey-like state of stupor — rushed pell-mell into solar and wind causing electricity prices to blow out…. even these morons have backed away from thorium because although their stupidity is epic in scale…. it is not epic enough to pour billions into such an obvious boondoggle….
‘They apparently focused on its then weaknesses (which were to be solved in theory in the next generation of tech)’
That statement qualifies for the DelusiSTAN Hall of Fame.
It is like saying — The project to fly to Pluto was halted because NASA was apparently focused on the weaknesses — which were to be solved in theory in the next generation of tech.
It all sounds so promising — until you identify the weaknesses which are : we cannot travel at the speed of light — and humans cannot survive cosmic radiation over such a long journey.
The weakness of thorium is of course that the energy input exceeds the energy output.
‘Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.’ Peter Karamoskos, of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/23/thorium-nuclear-uranium
Let me simplify this for you.
You open up a Starbucks coffee shop in the slums of Addis Ababa — a cup of coffee sells for USD4. The people in the slums earn on average $2 per day.
You sell no coffee – each day you remain open you lose money.
Do you remain open on the expectation that some day the problem of the $4 coffee vs the $2 daily wage will some how be resolved?
Or do you realize that you have made a seriously stupid decision to open the Starbucks…. and cut your loses before you pour your entire life savings into a senseless venture.
I have a sneaking suspicion … based on your comments … that you would keep the Starbucks open…
The “science” is proven on a great deal of things, like “space” solar, colonies on Mars and likely cold fusion……so effing what! Any clown can rabbit on about woulda, coulda, shoulda and if. The simple fact is that in today’s real world, dreams on paper won’t convert to facts without cheap excess energy and finance. If there is not enough cheap excess energy and finance readily available then it has to be taken from where it’s used elsewhere………and elsewhere ain’t given’ it up without a fight. Politically and selfishly it’s all the same, we got to this point on the back of abundant, cheap FF’ and they’re gone. To go beyond this point we need more of the same of what got here, not pipedreams and scammers.
++++++++++
I agree if it is, at the end of the day, a net energy sink, it is not sustainable/viable. Since we would most likely have to go to a global command to make the tech work, that I agree most likely won’t happen. I never argued it would save the day, just that the tech is viable, in a world were we didn’t cancel the project in the early 70’s and hade gen 4/5 Th reactors running/being built now. You could use the same logic for investing the funds to build a nuclear reactor in the 1940’s. It hadn’t been done so who would be crazy enough to do it? But they did it. I’m sure you know about the economic concept of barries to entry, apprently this tech has a pretty big one. Solar had visible (get it) returns, long term thorium research does not, so no surprise the investment on a dropped us tech is marginal so far. So I agree it may not be feasible to achieve the point were the tech is net energy positive, due to economic and global issues. But it appears the tech is sound, just at the top of a mountain that is too difficult for us to climb at the moment.
I’m not sure the guy who wants to abolish nuclear weapons is the best source to have an unbiased view on the subject, but I do understand your viewpoint, however I think on this particalar point you are wrong, unless you are saying regardless if we could get thorium working on a crash program it is too late to the party to make a difference. That may end up being the chase. I also agree there could be an arguement made that chasing it now would be a waste of resources, better to us em all to keep the party going for as long as possible.
But if Thorium did offer a slim chance of the human specisies pulling its own ass out of the fire, is it worth the risk? I am told that in a survival situation, the will to surivie is one of the most important traits to have, and giving up too early can have terminal effects. I agree things do look pretty bleak, and most likely we won’t be able to change the terminal decline we seem to be on, but should we not rage against the dying of the light? Or just say good run, we gave it all we had, don’t fight the end? I’m told if the Apollo 13 mission failed, the astronauts were going to vent the atmo, rather than suffer a slow death as they floated off into space. I can see doing that at 100% confidence. But I’m not there, call it 99.9. The .1% is holding out for the hail mary. I’d rather go down swinging, even if it is futile, on the best chance out there, than end up in some galatice you tube darwin award video. With aliens laughing at us since we had the tech to save the day but didn’t use it.
If the tech is sound, but required a global command economy and a bit of luck to pull off, should we give it a go? Or just let everything else go, since even if we fix this issue, there are many more stacking up behind it? Lets put those google engineers on the case, what say they? Thorium – delusion or salvation? Maybe someone smarter than your or I or some anti-nuke person needs to call the shot on this. Get a crack team of scientists on it throw a few billion at it, we wouldn’t be any worse off than we are now, and if it somehow it is the miracle it might be, we can see if it allows us the chance of solving other problems that we would face if the energy issue was sovled.
Again this is based on my understanding that there is a viable LFTR reactor design, but it needs some materials/design work to bring it to commerical scale,and that would cost a lot and take a lot of time. Kinda like the nuclear reactor projects in the 40’s/50’s. Germany couldn’t do it, but we did, we had more time and money. Tough but in theory solvable problems, that would require perhaps a new class of metals/materials, new/more advanded pyroprocessing, and possibly in solving those hurdles we will discover new ones. So you can listen to the anti-nuke guy, I’ll listen to the guy who invented nuke reactors int he first place, in my book that person is more credible. He wanted to give it a shot, thought it was promising enough to see if it would work, he was denied his chance. Maybe it won’t work out, but it seems worth a shot. Since you don’t know for 100% it will fail, whats the harm? It succeeds? We keep going till the next limit or we learn from our mistakes. It fails? We are right back were we started? I guess I fail to see the down side, unless our attemp brings collapse that much sooner? Seems a worthwhile trade to me.
You are right. Nuclear is not demonstrating that it can save the world. World nuclear output was highest in 2006. It was declining until 2012, and now is increasing a little, but is still far below its peak.
China seems to be putting a lot of nuclear electricity online. France’s nuclear energy output peaked in 2005 — this may be part of the problem that Turiel was writing about. Japan has not gotten much of its nuclear power back on line.
One of the big issues is replacing all of the old nuclear plants that are reaching the ends of their lives. Now that there is a belief that more safety features are needed, the cost is so high that hardly anyone can afford them. I suspect that China, India, and other more cost conscious countries are still building lower-cost plants.
I suspect most of the costs in the West originate from safety laws and planning costs. Once the Chinese have cracked Thorium, i.e. have an operational reactor and design with a good EROEI, they’ll build a factory to mass produce them. I’m sure experts from the West will aid them. These guys are nuts, they have no patience.
For instance, they have plans to add one GW of coal-fired capacity per week for the next four years!
When they get going they are ants. Check this out:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a-meltdown-proof-nuclear-reactor-next-year/
The pebble-bed Thorium reactors where already in Germany a big disappointment – made lots of problems with the fuel and have nothing to do with LFTR. I down’t know why people do those… and not straight go to pursue LFTR or DWR.
I meant DFR not DWR: http://dual-fluid-reactor.org/
“Once the Chinese have cracked Thorium, i.e. have an operational reactor and design with a good EROEI”
Okay, so now you’re flip-flopping on me. First, you said it worked and now you’re saying the Chinese need to build an operational reactor with a good EROI, which would indicate no one knows if it works yet.
There are a few Thorium reactors in operation. There should be no use of the future tense “once”.
“These guys are nuts, they have no patience. ”
Which is a nice way of saying they’re going to quickly slap something together that may not work properly.
“When they get going they are ants.”
I’m not sure what you mean by “ants”…but if it means what I think it does,
it’s naive for you to think you have an army of slaves in China, waiting to make your life better, to say the least.
To quote Gail,
“We need to understand where we really are, not live in a fairy tale world produced by politicians
(elite, and members of the Intelligensia)
who would like us to believe that the situation is under control.”
I think this sentence applies to you.
You think the technocrats will save us.
This belief is unfounded.
None of these are LFTR / DFR types with a liquid fuel cycle….
Yeah, they might find a way to produce electricity for a while longer but what if anything will they be EATING?
Has anyone found a way to EAT electricity?
Aside from that ‘minor’ detail, we will likely all be dead before 2030 because of climate change destroying most of our food production & hyperthermia, so it’s both starve AND cook!
We won’t be worrying about who should turn off the lights. What “lights”?
https://guymcpherson.com/2017/02/faster-than-expected/
“Aside from that ‘minor’ detail, we will likely all be dead before 2030 because of climate change destroying most of our food production & hyperthermia, so it’s both starve AND cook!”
Normally I would assume someone writing this was *of course* joking. There are currently more than 7.5 billion people on earth. Do you really think that by 2030, there won’t be more than 8 billion?
They also recognize that they have a lot of coal fired plants already built, and a lot of people making their living mining coal. China demand for electricity now pretty close to flat. They can’t keep adding a lot of generation any more.
‘Once the Chinese have cracked Thorium’
I am holding my breath so this better happen soon….
Of course this is never going to happen – but let’s assume it does — the world runs on cheap oil … not electricity….
The truly only ascendant country in terms of nuclear is Russia, followed with gap by China with access to both US and Russian reactor designs. Russia is now able to supply fuel to western design powerplants, remind you it doesn’t work the other-way around, as western attempts to supply pellets to Russian type reactors failed on quality grounds. But they are also the first to design and operate latest gen3+ conventional reactors ~1.2GW and up, export them under various financing schemes/leases. Not mentioning the pinpoint of their efforts as they are the only country with operating commercial grade (and building bigger fleet of them as we speak) of breeder reactors, therefore partly closing the fuel cycle.. or extending the fuel supply if you will. So, the hope and prospect is they will be able to cook lotsa domestic shale into the future, this could be way cheaper and reliable than full scale arctic drilling, who knows..
However, the probability that falling down hegemons like US might rather start thermonuclear or bioweapon type global cleansing is almost as high as the Russians left alone to be allowed capitalized on their relatively favorable position.
Russia has not really added all that much nuclear recently. China’s nuclear is growing very rapidly. At the recent past rate, China’s nuclear might exceed Russia’s in 2016 or perhaps 2017.
I know that we have bought a lot of fuel from Russia over the years, but I thought that contract had run out. Also, I know that uranium prices are very low now, production likely dropping as a result.
Hi Gail,
The Chinese and Russian economies now operate as a combined entity so there’s no meaningful distinction relating to their energy strategy. For example, Russia promises more coal so China builds a huge number of coal plants. Russia promises nuclear fuel so China builds nuclear plants. Russia promises more gas and the Chinese respond appropriately.
It appears these two fuels will dominate the future, coal and Uranium; with Thorium acting as an added growth vector. It’s had to imagine that 200,000 Russians work in the nuclear industry; that’s a massive deployment of human capital. They don’t necessarily need to build the most plants to dominate the industry; and with a smaller population won’t require such.
Good luck with kick-starting thorium, which is just more pro-nuclear hype to get a few more tax dollars for that failing industry.
Thorium as a fuel-cycle is not only difficult to work, it’s expensive, far more so than conventional nuclear, it’s cranky (almost as challenging as fusion, and all know where that’s gotten so far) and exceedingly dangerous.
I wouldn’t anticipate a commercial system of this sort to be operational in under 40 years, given the technological, social and economic hurdles. Hmm, sounds increasingly like fusion, by which stage the modern world will have already been consigned to the garbage can of history.
There is certainly trade between the two countries, but China is not one of Russia’s top trading partners and Russia is not one of China’s trading partners, at least in the recent past.
China is shutting down some of its own coal mines. It is hard to believe it would want to import much coal from Russia, when its own coal mines are closing.
We already have the = of 56,000,000 Hiroshima’s ready to roar…. what’s a few million more!
Go China Go!
Dear Eddy,
Where’s the origin or need for pessimism? It’s stated that China will add one GW of coal-fired capacity per week for the next four years! That is 204GW’s
One Cubic Mile of oil is 104 500MW coal-fired power plants, developed each year for 50 years, or 52 1GW coal-fired plants per year.
Sure China is already hitting that mark!!! What are you on about??? We’re grand, sure billions will die but the insiders won’t.
…..but the insiders won’t. Oh I get it, you’re just another conspiracy nutter. Short on names and facts, long on theories.
Hey man, if Krupp can survive World War 2 … ha! And guess what? Correct me if I’m wrong but has a Rothschild ever died violently?
The point I’m making is … you guessed it. The dumbasses die, they always do the dying. The smart n savvy not so much.
“The dumbasses die, they always do the dying. The smart n savvy not so much.”
I got it. You are a smart and savvy insider. And you will never die. Never ever. And out of sheer gratitude you share with us a little insider wisdom. Thank you for that. You see, I always wanted to become an Illuminati like you. Could you help me with that? Or could you at least spare a dime for my apprenticeship in this expansive school for successful psychopathic rulers?
I have no idea when I’ll die; I’ve survived this long so there’s my track record of successfully living, i.e. not dying …So far.
But for all my insights I’m probably on the list for extermination. These are interesting times, right?
I was at the sociopath committee meeting in Shanghai last week, discussing pools of spent fuel and such. One attendee asserted “As far as we can tell in Germany we only require 20% of the population as producers.”
And another said “But what of the rest?”
“Oh they get killed!! he laughed.
And we all laughed and smiled aside from the fellow who asked the question. And then it dawned on me that he was different, that he wasn’t a psychopath.
And I said, “You do know we’re all psychopaths, right?”
‘sociopath committee meeting in Shanghai’
Is there are a website for this?
Is that what you offer for names and facts……for pity sake woman, many mass and ordinary murderers survived WW2 and many other wars and from all walks of life and from all combatants, including Japan, UK. USA, France and Russia. There would also be millions of families that have not have had a member die violently but financial circumstances can certainly make it more difficult.
This time — is different
104 x 50 x this:
http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/lg/public/2015/12/06/beijing-smog-alert.jpg
Without energy & resources, their will be very little technical progress.
IF we survive catastrophic climate change, there will be very few surviving humans left who will have any interest in advancing technology, they will just be happy to have shelter & a full belly that night!
Agree!
All of you are familiar with exponential growth in population. But that’s not the only thing that exhibits exponential growth. Science and technology has done so as well, which is how you can carry around a computer in your pocket that would have been considered a supercomputer not that many years ago.
It has only been 20 years years since computers started beating grand masters at chess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)
Go was considered to be thousands of times harder than chess. But computers (and programs) reached the leave of defeating masters last year. A program that beats humans at poker has been in the news lately.
And there is Watson. A variation on that seems to be better at spotting skin cancer than dermatologists was reported last week.
Things may fall apart before we build machines who could show us how we get out of the mess but that is not certain. It depends on the exponents.
Some of us have known for a very long time that exponential growth in a finite planet isn’t possible no matter what economist or the governments say. Scientists have been warning us for decades that this system is not sustainable, that growth can’t continue, there are limits.
Governments continue to restrict a women’s right to her own body, force her to stay pregnant & deliver yet another unwanted child who will probably fail to see it’s fifth birthday.
Without resources & energy, technology is helpless, no matter how skilled or knowledgeable you might be, you will produce nothing without energy & resources.
That’s the situation any survivors will face after we collapse & the roads to that are many & we are on one of those roads & closing in on “sizzle”, “fizzle” or “boom”.
Leave it alone, there’s no getting through… 🙂
“finite planet ”
That’s one of the keys. Going off planet for energy.
“restrict a women’s right”
Then there is China during the one child days and Scientology. Both force abortions on women.
“Without resources & energy,”
There is plenty of solar energy. Have you ever considered what the Sun wastes? With enough cheap energy you can make all the hydrocarbon fuels you want.
Will we go this way? For the US, I doubt it. But there are other countries.
Solar energy is very dispersed/spread out, solar panels can capture only a small fraction of the energy that strikes it’s cells.
We cannot manufacture solar cells, mine the raw materials, smelt, shape, manufacture or transport the panels without fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are a very condensed, concentrated, portable form of energy & raw materials but it’s limited.
We won’t have “cheap energy” for much longer & you still need resources/raw materials before you can “make hydrocarbons”.
It’s been quite a wild wild party for a small minority of the worlds peoples, we blew through hundreds of millions of years of preserved ancient sunlight in just a few hundred years.
Which is why it’s so laughable to even believe in a moment of madness that by catching a tiny fraction of current solar energy we can replace the vast amounts of condensed, fossil sunlight we currently use. That’s like expecting a very slow drip to replace a flood of energy!
We will be losing much more than just electricity, food & transportation & two biggies.
Now oils in decline, “renewables” can never “replace oil”, we have arrived at the cliff & stepped over the edge, the next step we were expecting wasn’t there. It’s a long ways down.
Have faith they said, we will come up with something.
They can’t, there are limits.
“We cannot manufacture . . . . without fossil fuels.”
You make it sound like fossil fuels are some kind of unreplaceable magic ingredient. They are not. The chemistry of making carbon neutral replacements for gasoline, diesel and everything else made from oil is very well understood.
If you want to argue the economics, then it becomes a design to cost problem. If our current technology is not up to the task, we need to invest in research to improve the technology and reduce the cost. Not saying this is easy, but I don’t think a blanket statement about what we can’t do is justified.
“Which is why it’s so laughable to even believe in a moment of madness that by catching a tiny fraction of current solar energy we can replace the vast amounts of condensed, fossil sunlight we currently use.”
I don’t think you have run the numbers involved. The current output of the Sun is around 4 x 10^25 W. The current human use of energy (most of it fossil) is around 1.5 x 10^13 W. I.e., human use of energy compared to the Sun’s output is indeed tiny, around one part in a trillion.
To replace all the energy humans use now would take around 3000 five GW power satellites in GEO. Decades ago, G. Harry Stein worked out that GEO can hold at least 177 TW of power satellites.
Not saying this is easy, but it can be analyzed.
I’m sure it has been analyzed to death, I know the solar output is more than we currently use or proabley could ever use but we cannot pave the OCEAN with solar cells, we cannot pave the land with them either because there simply isn’t enough resources or energy to do so.
Aside from that, we still have to use land to grow our food, build our developments on & to mine raw materials.
No I don’t have the math involved but I do read the studies from people who do know the math & who know what resources would be needed to build enough solar panes, wind turbines, wave generators etc & the result is we will come up very short & then what? in less than 30 years, they will need replacements & replacement parts, we will need to keep building more to keep up with our demand & that will be simply impossible!
Anything can be analyzed but can that analysis result in accomplishing the impossible? I don’t think so.
I humanity does not make any technical advances, most of us are toast. But do you really think technical progress will stand still?
When it comes to belief systems, I suppose Positivism is as good as any.
Not everybody, however, is a true believer in the creed:
Good points!
If the system interconnected system we have now of banks, international trade, electricity, internet, and many other things crashes, I am afraid the answer is, “Yes, technical progress will not only stand still, it will take great steps backward.” Our ability to make technical progress is very dependent on the interconnected systems we have in place today.
And then there’s this from Hannah Arendt:
There is definitely a problem with diminishing returns as more and more academic papers are published. Papers get published that are less and less worthy of being published. There is also the problem of building on wrong results. Our current huge expenditure of resources on academic papers needs to be cut back, IMO.
I think that they had a similar outlook at the height of the Roman Empire.
once again
surplus energy allowed humankind to have advanced technology
advanced technology will not allow humankind to have surplus energy
just sayin—again
I am impressed by how certain some people are.
I am impressed by how certain some people are.
One problem constantly ignored is that those so called “renewables” produce NONE of the essential raw materials we now get from fossil resources.
A second problem is that “renewables” are totally DEPENDENT UPON OIL to exist, they are made from, by & with oil, coal & natural gas, the raw materials their made from as you pointed out are limited & will become exhausted. “Renewables” are NOT “renewable”, only there source of energy is renewable.
Too many people are under the impression that these high tech “renewables” can “replace” oil, nothing could be further from the truth, most of us wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for fossil resources & we would be “lucky” if 1 billion of us are still alive after oil.
I do not see how we can continue to generate electricity after the oil age, for one thing, we won’t be able to FEED ourselves without the FERTILIZER from natural gas, the FUEL from OIL to power our farm equipment & for transportation, & the ENERGY for mining the raw materials for “renewables” & the energy for manufacturing those solar cells, wind turbines, wave generators, turbines for hydroelectric & other manufactured goods. We won’t have the energy to just maintain those systems either let alone expand them. Growth is ending, it’s not sustainable.
Solar & wind just can’t produce the reliable, intense energy we need or the raw materials to support our high energy civilization.
This civilization, 7.5 billion humans & electricity are a product of temporary resources.
Life after OIL will be cold, dark & very VERY HUNGRY!
Nobody said we needed to support 7.5 billion people.
But yes, I would guess we probably need somewhere in the region of 3-4 billion people, distributed between the young, future workers, and the present employed, to keep the system going.
If the rest starve and die, well, they starve and die. This is as old as human history itself. It’s about power relations, and where you and your progeny end up in the hierarchy.
The dynamics become very different if leaders decide not to support 7.5 billion people. Cutting off immigration is a major step in this direction. Mexico is expected to have a lot of immigrants, given its declining oil supply. The Moslem countries listed in Trump’s order included several with declining oil supply (but also several others as well).
If each country decides to support only its own people, the countries with inadequate resources are left to fail. The problem, however, is that all countries are interdependent. Without imports from other countries, no country can produce very much. Also, many countries are dependent on food exports from the US. These food importing nations cannot afford food imports unless they can sell their own exports of goods. If our policies block exports of those countries, then the countries cannot afford our food, that they would buy. This leads to a humanitarian disaster, besides cutting off the US’s sales of exported food.
@Gail
that brings us right back to my universal law of nations:
that if a country does not produce sufficient indigenous energy from within its own borders, to fulfil the demands of its people, it must beg buy borrow or steal it from somewhere else–or revert back to a level of population that can support itself.
Apply that to any country, and it fits, large or small.
I am waiting on Trump to announce death panels — all useless feeders to be put to death — including the elderly, the disabled, mentally challenged people, all welfare and unemployment insurance recipients….
This would need to be fair and not arbitrary — otherwise the New York Times and Huffington will moan and wail —- therefore each person on The List must be given the opportunity to convince the Death Panel that they deserve to live — that they are contributing to keeping BAU alive.
Such a policy might buy us some time…. I support him in doing ‘whatever it takes’
Desperate times require desperate measures.
It might get a little lonely on FW if the cut off is 60…..
LOL!
which half of the world population do you intend to join?
I agree. I made a very long post, without saying all of the things that need to be said.
Actually, coal is used to produce nitrogen fertilizer in China; we use natural gas in the US because we have lots of cheap natural gas.
On point #6 the best way to store summer heat for winter heating is to heat the ground under the building you want to heat. This is done with success in some northern European countries and in Minnesota. See for example https://www.hugllc.com/
https://www.hugllc.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8&Itemid=146
It is certainly a nice efficient system. The heated sand box seems to be helpful.
Whether it is resilient, when things go wrong, is different question. I can see some things that would seem to break pretty easily, such as the windows. As long as all of the spare parts suppliers are available, that should be no problem.
Well wind and solar sure saved California!
In order to believe this, all one has to do is ignore all the “alternative facts,” as Kelly Anne Conway called them.
https://s23.postimg.org/ht6lieyi3/Captura_de_pantalla_832.png
https://s23.postimg.org/3ynysf4h7/Captura_de_pantalla_535.png
California is importing a whole lot more electricity from out of state now, also. Nuclear is in the process of disappearing; that will mean even more imports from out of state.
Total consumption has been near flat for a long time.
Let’s hope neighbors have electricity for sale at a somewhat reasonable price.
Wow. It looks like hydro has been cut in half since 2012.
Hydro rises and falls. In the US, the general trend has been down. Part of the problem is the maintenance required on old facilities. If this is not done, they are less productive, and may close. Also, we already have put dams in place most places where they make economic sense. I would imagine that low electricity prices (because of wind and solar) affects decisions on whether to keep older hydro plants open as well.
One thing I was not aware of is that fact that many dams are already in place, that are not powered. This article says:
I expect that the dams that are not currently powered are ones where earlier analyses suggested that doing so would not make economic sense.
Silly me I thought California wanted to exit the union. I must have read that news article on Yahoo wrong LOL
If Cali secedes, they will need to take Oregon & Washington with them, that’s where their electric imports are coming from. I think that nuclear power plant on the Columbia, Hanford, is on it’s way out, what can replace that? Certainly not wind or solar!
The country of “Cascadia” might be viable if we didn’t include southern Cali!
Viable until we all roast!
I think where we are “adonis” is over the cliff, we just haven’t gone “splat” yet, but it’s coming!
It’s coming sooner, faster, quicker & hotter than expected.
I remember pointing out that I was hoping that California needed to remember where it is getting its energy supplies from.
Do you also know the growth to debt ratio for Texas/California?
I just saw the movie Resident Evil: the final chapter. In it we find out that the Umbrella corporation released the deadly t-virus intentionally to kill off the human while its executives and families stay safe in cryo-stasis in underground bunkers.
Since we all agree human overshoot is killing Gaia is it not time to ask who will save Gaia? Ask not what Gaia can do for yu ask rather what you can do for Gaia. “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.” Our time has come round at last. Do we have the courage?
Ed,
Thank you for expressing an amorphous solution to all our problems. ALLOT of Doomers on Finite World continue to deny several pertinent FACTS:
1) All your leaders (including me) are psychopaths
2) We have feelings; but we feel differently about things (and people are things)
3) All of History supports point 1 and 2 including recent history:
“We came, we saw, he died!” ha ha ha … Hillary had a good laugh when she talked about destroying Libya and killing half a million people. And half of Americans agreed with her attitude on election day. By the way, I was in Libya for 200 days during the war; nice peaceful place until.
4) There’ll be no breakdown in civilization permitted anywhere that would threaten the continuing survival of humanity, a Spanish Flu like plague will break-out. Say in India, you think Indian elites care about 1 billion unwashed filthy sub-human scum?
“The World would be better off without them.”
5) Some biological agents (smallpox, pneumonic plague) have the capability of person-to-person transmission via aerosolized respiratory droplets. This feature can be undesirable, as the agent(s) may be transmitted by this mechanism to unintended populations, including neutral or even friendly forces. Though pulmonary anthrax infection starts with ordinary influenza-like symptoms and progresses to a lethal hemorrhagic mediastinitis within 3–7 days, with a fatality rate that is 90% or higher in untreated patients. Finally, friendly personnel can be protected with suitable antibiotics.
You think the sheep will survive?? Yeah right. This is the US governments track record against its own people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
Courage? No courage required. Just less people; the survivors will be better off. According to utilitarian and Kantian morality it’s the right and moral choice for everyone involved. The dead won’t miss anything and the survivors inherit their bling. Everyone benefits, no one suffers (that much).
Love,
Cathal
http://www.beforethecollapse.com/about
Hardly worthwhile replying to that nonsense. You don’t understand the implications of growth, the maintenance of growth and what creates and maintains “bling”. Do you think a virus selectively kills unimportant people? You must think that civilisation is similar to a person that eats 6000 calories a day, halves it and carries on as normal?
What makes the world go around is it’s networked parts, you now need the Internet, the extended power grid and road system and suburbs, police, plumbers, truck drivers, bakers, street sweepers, doctors, hair dressers, train drivers, computer programmers, software engineers, building engineers, garbage collectors, fishermen, shipping containers, oil tankers, mining machines, tourism, aircraft, radio, TV, sport, banks, coffe shops, stock market……..CONSUMERISM. You can’t lop 10, 20, 30, 50, 90% off and expect normality.
The exact reason the world is falling apart now is due to the decline and absence of growth. BAU lite is a pipe dream of the ignorant.
+++++++++
It is hard to support such a negative view. At the same time, for all species, natural selection requires that there be some winners and losers, so as to keep population in balance with what the resources can support. A hierarchical organization somewhat supports the outcome of the “most fit” surviving. People who are in the best health will tend to fight of disease best, but a person cannot really count on this. It is an unfortunate situation.
I think of both wind and solar energy as local rather than systemic solutions.
There is no systemic solution other than collapse.
When one think of America vs the Islamic world, for example, one should not think in terms of competing ideologies, or competing for wealth, etc. America vs. Islam is merely an incredibly huge front along which global collapse is occurring. In this case, Islam is a giant producer and exporter of hydrocarbons (without which they are nothing, desert camel jockeys), and America (and its global system) the giant consumer. America is of course a huge producer as well, but not enough for the system as a whole.
Neither America nor Islam will win! Is there anybody else who is stating this obvious fact? Both America and Islam will fall. Because in this game there are no winners. Only eternal conflict.
Once collapse begins in earnest, we will find out that the hydrocarbon energy lasts longer, once the rate of production slows in the post collapse scarcity economy.
Time for Russia, China and US to sit down and decide how the worlds remaining oil will be divided.
Without the mining companies, the banks, and the other companies to make the system operate, I am afraid the oil and gas stays in place indefinitely. We can no longer get it out.
We do have oil in storage I suppose that could hold us for a few months.
I understand that the US plans to sell oil 100 million barrels of oil from the SPR. The bids will start in in January, and the actual flows will begin in February and March.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Markets-Brace-As-US-Looks-To-Sell-100-Million-Barrels-From-SPR.html
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-To-Sell-First-8-Million-Barrels-From-Strategic-Reserves.html
The story seems to be that some of the storage needs upgrading. Also, there is some belief that we need less, and that the current location of crude storage (along the Gulf Coast) is not the best. Also, part of the reason for selling the crude oil is to finance the upkeep of the storage facility.
.
It seems like the timing is rather strange. But now that the world is awash with oil, the view is that the storage isn’t really needed very much.
I agree with all your points however I think diesel deserves more focus. Paraphrasing Alice Friedemann, we could survive without gasoline for our cars and with much less electricity. Diesel is the real problem. We do not have a viable alternative to the diesel that powers our critical life support network of trucks, trains, ships, tractors, combines, and mining machines. If trucks stop running, for any reason, all of civilization will be in immediate and extreme danger.
I agree that diesel is a real problem, that deserves more focus. We can’t replace diesel with electricity. We definitely need trucks, trains, ships, tractors and combines.
I am afraid that there are a whole lot of other real problems that I didn’t list. For one thing, we cannot pay for all of the wind turbines, solar panels, and all the transmission without an enormous amount of debt. If we were burning fuels directly, the required debt would be a whole lot lower. The debt problem by itself would sink the economy.
“We can’t replace diesel with electricity.” Yes, because in many cases, diesel is the one creating the electricity.
Don’t forget maritime shipping. The 90,000 cargo ships on the seas, rivers and lakes are all using oil for propulsion, usually the dirtiest varieties. There is no substitute fuel on the horizon that is remotely scalable. And the IMO has done nothing to rein in CO2 emissions, in contravention of the UNFCCC. Nine out of every ten purchases of goods globally depend on maritime transport in today’s corporate consumer economy. Maritime shipping’s oil dependence is an even greater Achilles heel for establishing an anticipated “clean” energy economy. Although sail transport can’t ever supply the volumes of world trade currently happening, it is clean, truly renewable, and is at least a sure thing for sustainably supplying some basics for subsistence.
– Jan Lundberg, independent oil industry analyst
http://www.SailTransportNetwork
http://www.SailMed.org
http://www.CultureChange.org
@There is no substitute fuel on the horizon that is remotely scalable
And what about LNG, ethane, DME?
Do not forget that a gas turbine drive can use also gasoline, jet fuel etc
The point is that there are no ready plans or facilities to bring about a significant substitution of oil for the ships’ propulsion. There are but a handful of LNG engines installed, and no program to ramp this up significantly. The units out there are mostly as tests or showcases. The shipping industry wants to improve its green image, so such projects get some attention, including more streamlined hulls for more efficient use of fuel. I was not favorably impressed that the main “alternative” possibly planned, LNG, gives only a reduction in CO2 emissions of 25%. Natural gas is still petroleum. I have met with major shipping representatives, and they are operating on the assumption that crude oil supplies will be plentiful for decades. You have brought up mere possibilities, not “significant” (as I said) ones being used much today, nor ready (for but a few ships) soon. “Scalable” — as well as being able to make a major, investment-heavy industrial shift in a timely fashion — is the operative word in my Comment. Invest in a sail boat, besides growing your own food and improving community resiliency.
Fossil fuels are all part of the same limited stock.
Good points! We definitely need maritime shipping.
Diesel is really amazing and efficient stuff. On my 5 acre farm, I have a small tractor (30HP I think…). The tractor saves so much time and human effort on any variety of tasks: without it, farming would probably be impossible because it would have to be our full-time job.
As much use as we get out of it, I probably use about 20 gallons of diesel A YEAR. For all that hauling, plowing, tilling, lifting, dragging, pushing. Absolutely amazing.
you are doing all the right things for where you are right now.
prob is—as you no doubt realise—diesel is part of bau.
On UK TV there’s a series of programmes i really enjoy, on folks “roughing it” in the arctic (00s of miles from anywhere)
They are very determined capable individuals—but one has a skid steel loader and a 6 wheel ATV—the other has a backhoe digger and an ATV (how did they get there)
—there are several other disparate groups, all with outboard motors, chainsaws etc
one can only wish them well
‘Look at me with my chain saw and quad and 4×4 and rifle living out here in the wilderness on my own — other than driving 50km to the shop to stock up on organic granola and a few other must haves…. I am Mr Sustainable… I am Mr Ultimate Prepper!’
I am sure George Carlin could turn this into an extensive comedy routine….
@ Eddy
Fantasy spoiler!!!!!!!
Norman-
You know it. Guys around here think they are independent by having their own chainsaw, tractor and wood splitter. It is why I gave up my own chainsaw and went to the crosscut saw. Even that is pretty BAU because I need files to sharpen them and they will never be produced again.
My only highpoint I can say is that a good crosscut is a joy to use and I’ve bought enough of them and related gear to last myself and my kids a lifetime.
No offence Froggman. I know you know what is going on.
Norman, we have a similar show in the US about folks in the wilderness of Alaska. No doubt they’re living a much more independent life than I ever have, but they’re still supported by lots of rifle bullets, batteries, food products, etc. It’d be a very different show if those tenuous connections to BAU were cut.
Diesel will just be the beginning of my problems on the farm post BAU- after all, if I didn’t have a paycheck to earn I could sink more time into manual labor. But the grain for my pigs, winter feed for my goats, and innumerable other things that keep the farm alive come from off-site. Without them, my farm quickly turns into a house with a big overgrown yard…
i guess its the same series we have here
the woman who runs a mini-airport well above the arctic circle, an eskimo family fishing etc—absolutely fascinating stuff
I soon came to the same conclusions…. and abandoned the model … in favour of the 20 ft Container and Rock Cut concepts….
Froggman-
Diesel is amazing for sure. Nevertheless, I’ve been trying to do everything by hand, and I mean everything. No electricity, no fuel, no nothing other than hand tools. I worked my hole out today hauling one log out of the woods. It was disappointing but I was trying something new and it did not work out as well as I’d hoped. It was a huge log though.
Wow Joe, that’s pretty hardcore. I’m sure the skill and functional strength you develop from those activities will be priceless soon.
Of course I still have some manual lifting and hauling to do, but not to the extent I’d have to without the tractor. Mostly I build my strength the bourgeois first-world way: with a barbell. I hope my proficiency at the squat and deadlift will be transferable to dragging logs and such, when the demand arises.
Frogman-
I’ve lifted weights for years. Nothing better to keep in shape in combination with hard physical work. I bought a book you mentioned called “Starting Strength”. Great book. It has me doing far more deadlifts. Anyone not prepping the body these days is in for it…well that, and stocking toilet paper.
When BAU ends — within weeks this will be me…
https://adrianjamesnutrition.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/killer-6-pack-abs.jpg
Within a couple of months this will be me…
http://weshapelife.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/homeless-man-768×506-1.jpg
And just before the end comes….
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/6a/08/22/6a0822538a98d3fbce2f8f44ef621011.jpg
Give me a few weeks to bulk up …. and I’ll get a photo up…
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fiLbtgnhKj8/Uf_3riQiFfI/AAAAAAAAA7o/xK_DFm_P4OA/s1600/GeneDoping3_widec.jpg
Of course, you need the tractor as well, and replacement parts for the tractor, if one of those parts fails. So no matter how little fuel you use, you need the whole system that gives you replacement parts too.
Traditional doomsday preppers were prepping for a one off catastrophe — that resulted in a period of weeks… perhaps months…. of chaos… with the assumption being that eventually there would be a reset —- the common belief is that the chaos purged the system of corruption and therefore was a good thing.
All that was required is enough preparations to get through the chaos. That is where gold and silver come into the formula…. after the chaos if you had some PMs — you would be stylin….
Unfortunately the preppers do not understand that when BAU collapses — it will be a permanent state —- it will be as if you had been launched on a one way trip to Mars…. if you didn’t pack it you won’t be able to get it on the way…. if something breaks — you won’t be able to fix it because there will be no spare parts…
Acknowledging this is very sobering. If you really think long and hard about it — you will realize that in a fairly short time period most of your preps will run out — or break. Or you will realize that you forgot to stockpile quite a few things that are absolutely essential to your survival.
This is why I highly recommend the Fast Eddy Challenge.
This challenge is a dry run that lasts for a month — during this period you shut off BAU — you rely only on your preps. It will give you the opportunity to identify the weak points in your prep — and to eliminate these weak points before there is no more Walmart.
The Fast Eddy Challenge is without question critical in getting your preps right.
Yet nobody wants to try it.
I was recently contacted by Chris Martenson who explained to me ‘if you make it free Fast nobody will take is serious — I ran into the same problem with my Peak Prosperity Packages – but when I attached a fee people perceived it as valuable and they pulled out their credit cards — good for them — good for me’
I am pleased to announce that Chris and I have teamed up on a new web site http://www.fasteddychallenge.com complete with paywall…. this site provides comprehensive details on how to prep and how to thoroughly test your prep.
Finite World members receive a 1% discount on the package price simply by typing ‘FW’ into the coupon field.
In Australia, renewables are mainly used to cover peak demand, especially hydro power. Without them, there would already be load shedding. Coal power is maxed out at 93% at peak.
28/1/2017
Power Supply in New South Wales: how will it cope in coming heatwave?
http://crudeoilpeak.info/power-supply-in-australias-new-south-wales-how-will-it-cope-in-coming-heatwave
Updated with actual demand and price spike graph
There are no enduring efforts to replace base load coal by e.g geothermal. Parliaments are stuck in endless debates.
I can see that even with running coal at 93% of capacity, it is nowhere near meeting middle of the day demand.
The situation is sort of “cross your fingers and hope” that with everything in place, it will be possible to meet demand when demand is high.
We are toast. Jeez look at that chart, almost all coal!
Coal in many places is the most reliable source of electricity we have. Especially Australia!
Hopefully Trump eviscerates solar, wind and every other ‘green’ energy nonsense…. and puts the US on a 100% fossil fuel diet.
That would eliminate a great deal of inefficiencies — for instance why burn coal to make solar packages and get less energy out than you put in —- and it might allow BAU to stagger on a few more years.
Death to ‘Renewable’ Energy!
Trump should order the brown shirts to hurl stones at solar panels and burn EVs.
I received this link this afternoon. http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/donald-trump-investing-big-in-wind-energy/5733
Apparently Trump wants to invest in wind related things in his infrastructure plan.
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/19/toshiba-collapses-nuclear-reactor-business-write-offs/
There are also major cost overruns on the reactors that Toshiba is working on.
Toshiba is the one working on Georgia Power’s Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors. The original dates for completion was 2016 and 2017, and the original price seems to have been $4.4 billion each. Each rector is 1250 MW Gross; 1117 MW Net.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant
Now the project is over $3 billion over the original estimate and over 3 years late. Georgia Power owns 45.7% of the total project. https://www.georgiapower.com/about-energy/energy-sources/nuclear/construction-financials.cshtml
A recent report says,
This is only for 45.7% of the total of the two reactors. I suppose the $8 billion includes interest as well. The billing started a few years ago. We are starting to pay for the reactors, well in advance of when they go into service. (Georgia uses “cost plus” or “utility” pricing.)
Breathtaking…
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