The energy needs of the world’s economy seem to be easy to model. Energy consumption is measured in a variety of different ways including kilowatt hours, barrels of oil equivalent, British thermal units, kilocalories and joules. Two types of energy are equivalent if they produce the same number of units of energy, right?
For example, xkcd’s modeler Randall Munroe explains the benefit of renewable energy in the video below. He tells us that based on his model, solar, if scaled up to ridiculous levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a half-dozen of our neighbors. Wind, if scaled up to absurd levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a dozen of our neighbors.
There is a major catch to this analysis, however. The kinds of energy produced by wind and solar are not the kinds of energy that the economy needs. Wind and solar produce intermittent electricity available only at specific times and places. What the world economy needs is a variety of different energy types that match the energy requirements of the many devices in place in the world today. This energy needs to be transported to the right place and saved for the right time of day and the right time of year. There may even be a need to store this energy from year to year, because of possible droughts.
I think of the situation as being analogous to researchers deciding that it would be helpful or more efficient if humans could change their diets to 100% grass in the next 20 years. Grass is a form of energy product, but it is not the energy product that humans normally consume. It doesn’t seem to be toxic to humans in small quantities. It seems to grow quite well. Switching to the use of grass for food would seem to be beneficial from a CO2 perspective. The fact that humans have not evolved to eat grass is similar to the fact that the manufacturing and transport sectors of today’s economy have not developed around the use of intermittent electricity from wind and solar.
Substituting Grass for Food Might “Work,” but It Would Require Whole New Systems
If we consider other species, we find that animals with four stomachs can, in fact, live quite well on a diet of grass. These animals often have teeth that grow continuously because the silica in grass tends to wear down their teeth. If we could just get around these little details, we might be able to make the change. We would probably need to grow extra stomachs and add continuously growing teeth. Other adjustments might also be needed, such as a smaller brain. This would especially be the case if a grass-only diet is inadequate to support today’s brain growth and activity.
The problem with nearly all energy analyses today is that they use narrow boundaries. They look at only a small piece of the problem–generally the cost (or “energy cost”) of the devices themselves–and assume that this is the only cost involved in a change. In fact, researchers need to recognize that whole new systems may be required, analogous to the extra stomachs and ever-growing teeth. The issue is sometimes described as the need to have “wide boundaries” in analyses.
If the xkcd analysis netted out the indirect energy costs of the system, including energy related to all of the newly required systems, the results of the analysis would likely change considerably. The combined ability of wind and solar to power both one’s own home and those of a dozen and a half neighbors would likely disappear. Way too much of the output of the renewable system would be used to make the equivalent of extra stomachs and ever-growing teeth for the system to work. The world economy might not work as in the past, either, if the equivalent of the brain needs to be smaller.
Is “Energy Used by a Dozen of Our Neighbors” a Proper Metric?
Before I continue with my analysis of what goes wrong in modeling intermittent renewable energy, let me say a few words about the way Munroe quantifies the outcome of his energy analysis. He talks about “energy consumed by a household and a dozen of its neighbors.” We often hear news items about how many households can be served by a new electricity provider or how many households have been taken offline by a storm. The metric used by Munroe is similar. But, does it tell us what we need to know in this case?
Our economy requires energy consumption by many types of users, including governments to make roads and schools, farmers to plant crops and manufacturers to make devices of all kinds. Leaving non-residential energy consumption out of the calculation doesn’t make much sense. (Actually, we are not quite certain what Munroe has included in his calculation. His wording suggests that he included only residential energy consumption.) In the US, my analysis indicates that residential users consume only about a third of total energy.1 The rest is consumed by businesses and governments.
If we want to adjust Munroe’s indications to include energy consumed by businesses and governments, we need to divide the indicated number of residential households provided with energy by about three. Thus, instead of the units being “Energy Consumed by a Dozen of Our Neighbors,” the units would be “Energy Consumed by Four of Our Neighbors, Including Associated Energy Use by Governments and Businesses.” The apparently huge benefit provided by wind and solar becomes much smaller when we divide by three, even before any other adjustments are made.
What Might the Indirect Costs of Wind and Solar Be?
There are a number of indirect costs:
(1) Transmission costs are much higher than those of other types of electricity, but they are not charged back to wind and solar in most studies.
A 2014 study by the International Energy Agency indicates that transmission costs for wind are approximately three times the cost of transmission costs for coal or nuclear. The amount of excess costs tends to increase as intermittent renewables become a larger share of the total. Some of the reason for higher transmission costs for both wind and solar are the following:
(a) Disproportionately more lines need to be built for wind and solar because transmission lines need to be scaled to the maximum output, rather than the average output. Wind output is typically available 25% to 35% of the time; solar is typically available 10% to 25% of the time.
(b) There tend to be longer distances between where renewable energy is captured and where it is consumed, compared to traditional generation.
(c) Renewable electricity is not created in a fossil fuel power plant, with the same controls over the many aspects of grid electricity. The transmission system must therefore make corrections which would not be needed for other types of electricity.
(2) With increased long distance electricity transmission, there is a need for increased maintenance of transmission lines. If this is not performed adequately, fires are likely, especially in dry, windy areas.
There is recent evidence that inadequate maintenance of transmission lines is a major fire hazard.
In California, inadequate electricity line maintenance has led to the bankruptcy of the Northern California utility PG&E. In recent weeks, PG&E has initiated two preventative cut-offs of power, one affecting as many as two million individuals.
The Texas Wildfire Mitigation Project reports, “Power lines have caused more than 4,000 wildfires in Texas in the past three and a half years.”
Venezuela has a long distance transmission line from its major hydroelectric plant to Caracas. One of the outages experienced in that country seems to be related to fires close to this transmission line.
There are things that can be done to prevent these fires, such as burying the lines underground. Even using insulated wire, instead of ordinary transmission wire, seems to help. But any solution has a cost involved. These costs need to be recognized in modeling the indirect cost of adding a huge amount of renewables.
(3) A huge investment in charging stations will be needed, if anyone other than the very wealthy are to use electric vehicles.
Clearly, the wealthy can afford electric vehicles. They generally have garages with connections to electrical power. With this arrangement, they can easily charge a vehicle that is powered by electricity when it is convenient.
The catch is that the less wealthy often do not have similar opportunities for charging electric vehicles. They also cannot afford to spend hours waiting for their vehicles to charge. They will need inexpensive rapid-charging stations, located in many, many places, if electric vehicles are to be a suitable choice. The cost of rapid-charging will likely need to include a fee for road maintenance, since this is one of the costs that today is included in fuel prices.
(4) Intermittency adds a very substantial layer of costs.
A common belief is that intermittency can be handled by rather small changes, such as time-of-day pricing, smart grids and cutting off power to a few selected industrial customers if there isn’t enough electricity to go around. This belief is more or less true if the system is basically a fossil fuel and nuclear system, with a small percentage of renewables. The situation changes as more intermittent renewables are added.
Once more than a small percentage of solar is added to the electric grid, batteries are needed to smooth out the rapid transition that occurs at the end of the day when workers are returning home and would like to eat their dinners, even though the sun has set. There are also problems with electricity from wind cutting off during storms; batteries can help smooth out these transitions.
There are also longer-term problems. Major storms can disrupt electricity for several days, at any time of the year. For this reason, if a system is to run on renewables alone, it would be desirable to have battery backup for at least three days. In the short video below, Bill Gates expresses dismay at the idea of trying to provide a three-day battery backup for the quantity of electricity used by the city of Tokyo.
We do not at this point have nearly enough batteries to provide a three-day battery backup for the world’s electricity supply. If the world economy is to run on renewables, electricity consumption would need to rise from today’s level, making it even more difficult to store a three-day supply.
A much more difficult problem than three-day storage of electricity is the need for seasonal storage, if renewable energy is to be used to any significant extent. Figure 1 shows the seasonal pattern of energy consumption in the United States.
Figure 1. US energy consumption by month of year, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration. “All Other” is total energy, less electricity and transportation energy. It includes natural gas used for home heating. It also includes oil products used for farming, as well as fossil fuels of all kinds used for industrial purposes.
In contrast with this pattern, the production of solar energy tends to peak in June; it falls to a low level in December to February. Hydroelectric power tends to peak in spring, but its quantity is often quite variable from year to year. Wind power is quite variable, both from year to year and month to month.
Our economy cannot handle many starts and stops of electricity supply. For example, temperatures need to stay high for melting metals. Elevators should not stop between floors when the electricity stops. Refrigeration needs to continue when fresh meat is being kept cold.
There are two approaches that can be used to work around seasonal energy problems:
- Greatly overbuild the renewables-based energy system, to provide enough electricity when total energy is most needed, which tends to be in winter.
- Add a huge amount of storage, such as battery storage, to store electricity for months or even years, to mitigate the intermittency.
Either of these approaches is extremely high cost. These costs are like adding extra stomachs to the human system. They have not been included in any model to date, as far as I know. The cost of one of these approaches needs to be included in any model analyzing the costs and benefits of renewables, if there is any intention of using renewables as more than a tiny share of total energy consumption.
Figure 2 illustrates the high energy cost that can occur by adding substantial battery backup to an electrical system. In this example, the “net energy” that the system provides is essentially eliminated by the battery backup. In this analysis, Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) compares energy output to energy input. It is one of many metrics used to estimate whether a device is providing adequate energy output to justify the front-end energy inputs.
Figure 2. Graham Palmer’s chart of Dynamic Energy Returned on Energy Invested from “Energy in Australia.”
The example in Figure 2 is based on the electricity usage pattern in Melbourne, Australia, which has a relatively mild climate. The example uses a combination of solar panels, batteries and diesel backup generation. Solar panels and backup batteries provide electricity for the 95% of annual electricity usage that is easiest to cover with these devices; diesel generation is used for the remaining 5%.
The Figure 2 example could be adjusted to be “renewable only” by adding significantly more batteries, a large number of solar panels, or some combination of these. These additional batteries and solar panels would be very lightly used, bringing the EROEI of the system down to an even lower level.
To date, a major reason that the electricity system has been able to avoid the costs of overbuilding or of adding major battery backup is the small share they represent of electricity production. In 2018, wind amounted to 5% of world electricity; solar amounted to 2%. As percentages of world energy supply, they represented 2% and 1% respectively.
A second reason that the electricity system has been able to avoid addressing the intermittency issue is because backup electricity providers (coal, natural gas, and nuclear) have been forced to provide backup services without adequate compensation for the value of services that they are providing. The way that this happens is by giving wind and solar the subsidy of “going first.” This practice creates a problem because backup providers have substantial fixed costs, and they often are not being adequately compensated for these fixed costs.
If there is any plan to cease using fossil fuels, all of these backup electricity providers, including nuclear, will disappear. (Nuclear also depends on fossil fuels.) Renewables will need to stand on their own. This is when the intermittency problem will become overwhelming. Fossil fuels can be stored relatively inexpensively; electricity storage costs are huge. They include both the cost of the storage system and the loss of energy that takes place when storage is used.
In fact, the underfunding issue associated with allowing intermittent renewables to go first is already becoming an overwhelming problem in a few places. Ohio has recently chosen to provide subsidies to coal and nuclear providers as a way of working around this issue. Ohio is also reducing funding for renewables.
(5) The cost of recycling wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries needs to be reflected in cost estimates.
A common assumption in energy analyses seems to be that somehow, at the end of the design lifetime of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries, all of these devices will somehow disappear at no cost. If recycling is done, the assumption is made that the cost of recycling will be less than the value of the materials made available from the recycling.
We are discovering now that recycling isn’t free. Very often, the energy cost of recycling materials is greater than the energy used in mining them fresh. This problem needs to be considered in analyzing the real cost of renewables.
(6) Renewables don’t directly substitute for many of the devices/processes we have today. This could lead to a major step-down in how the economy operates and a much longer transition.
There is a long list of things that renewables don’t substitute for. Today, we cannot make wind turbines, solar panels, or today’s hydroelectric dams without fossil fuels. This, by itself, makes it clear that the fossil fuel system will need to be maintained for at least the next twenty years.
There are many other things that we cannot make with renewables alone. Steel, fertilizer, cement and plastics are some examples that Bill Gates mentions in his video above. Asphalt and many of today’s drugs are other examples of goods that cannot be made with renewables alone. We would need to change how we live without these goods. We could not pave roads (except with stone) or build many of today’s buildings with renewables alone.
It seems likely that manufacturers would try to substitute wood for fossil fuels, but the quantity of wood available would be far too low for this purpose. The world would encounter deforestation issues within a few years.
(7) It is likely that the transition to renewables will take 50 or more years. During this time, wind and solar will act more like add-ons to the fossil fuel system than they will act like substitutes for it. This also increases costs.
In order for the fossil fuel industries to continue, a large share of their costs will need to continue. The people working in fossil fuel industries need to be paid year around, not just when electrical utilities need backup electrical power. Fossil fuels will need pipelines, refineries and trained people. Companies using fossil fuels will need to pay their debts related to existing facilities. If natural gas is used as backup for renewables, it will need reservoirs to hold natural gas for winter, besides pipelines. Even if natural gas usage is reduced by, say, 90%, its costs are likely to fall by a much smaller percentage, say 30%, because a large share of costs are fixed.
One reason that a very long transition will be needed is because there is not even a path to transition away from fossil fuels in many cases. If a change is to be made, inventions to facilitate these changes are a prerequisite. Then these inventions need to be tested in actual situations. Next, new factories are needed to make the new devices. It is likely that some way will be needed to pay existing owners for the loss of value of their existing fossil fuel powered devices; if not, there are likely to be huge debt defaults. It is only after all of these steps have taken place that the transition can actually take place.
These indirect costs lead to a huge question mark regarding whether it even makes sense to encourage the widespread use of wind and solar. Renewables can reduce CO2 emissions if they really substitute for fossil fuels in making electricity. If they are mostly high cost add-ons to the system, there is a real question: Does it even make sense to mandate a transition to wind and solar?
Do Wind and Solar Really Offer a Longer-Term Future than Fossil Fuels?
At the end of the xkcd video shown above, Munroe makes the observation that wind and solar are available indefinitely, but fossil fuel supplies are quite limited.
I agree with Munroe that fossil fuel supplies are quite limited. This occurs because energy prices do not rise high enough for us to extract very much of them. The prices of finished products made with fossil fuels need to be low enough for customers to be able to afford them. If this is not the case, purchases of discretionary goods (for example cars and smart phones) will fall. Since cars and smart phones are made with commodities, including fossil fuels, the lower “demand” for these finished goods will lead to falling prices of commodities, including oil. In fact, we seem to have experienced falling oil prices most of the time since 2008.
Figure 3. Inflation adjusted weekly average Brent Oil price, based on EIA oil spot prices and US CPI-urban inflation.
It is hard to see why renewables would last any longer than fossil fuels. If their unsubsidized cost is any higher than fossil fuels, this would be one strike against them. They are also very dependent on fossil fuels for making spare parts and for repairing transmission lines.
It is interesting that climate change modelers seem to be convinced that very high amounts of fossil fuels can be extracted in the future. The question of how much fossil fuels can really be extracted is another modeling issue that needs to be examined closely. The amount of future extraction seems to be highly dependent on how well the current economic system holds together, including the extent of globalization. Without globalization, fossil fuel extraction seems likely to decline quickly.
Do We Have Too Much Faith in Models?
The idea of using renewables certainly sounds appealing, but the name is deceiving. Most renewables, except for wood and dung, aren’t very renewable. In fact, they depend on fossil fuels.
The whole issue of whether wind and solar are worthwhile needs to be carefully analyzed. The usual hallmark of an energy product that is of substantial benefit to the economy is that its production tends to be very profitable. With these high profits, governments can tax the owners heavily. Thus, the profits can be used to aid the rest of the economy. This is one of the physical manifestations of the “net energy” that the energy product provides.
If wind and solar were really providing substantial net energy, they would not need subsidies, not even the subsidy of going first. They would be casting off profits to benefit the rest of the economy. Perhaps renewables aren’t as beneficial as many people think they are. Perhaps researchers have put too much faith in distorted models.
Note:
[1] This is my estimate, based on EIA and BP data. With respect to electricity, EIA data shows that in the US, residential users consume about 38% of the total. With respect to fuels that are not used for transportation and not used for electricity, US residential users consume about 19% of these fuels. Combining these two categories, US households use about 31% of non-transportation fuels.
With respect to transportation fuels, the closest approximation we can get is by looking at petroleum use, divided between gasoline and other products. According to BP data, on a worldwide basis, 26% of petroleum is burned as gasoline. In the United States, about 46% of petroleum consumption is burned as gasoline. Of course, some of this gasoline usage is for non-residential use. For example, cars used by police and sales representatives are typically powered by gasoline, as are small trucks used by businesses.
Furthermore, the US is a major importer of manufactured goods from China and other parts of the world. The embodied energy in these imported goods never gets into US energy consumption statistics. In theory, we should add a little energy consumption by foreign manufacturers to supplement total reported US energy consumption.
The selection of “about a third” is based on these considerations.
“If there is any plan to cease using fossil fuels, all of these backup electricity providers, including nuclear, will disappear. (Nuclear also depends on fossil fuels.) Renewables will need to stand on their own.”
Why do you say nuclear depend on fossil fuels? (in fact, it seems you talk about nuclear not much on your blog)
It seems like every new fuel is to a significant extent dependent on previous fuels, and the whole infrastructure that has been built up using the combination of fuels that had been used previously.
Humans started out burning wood, dung and other biological materials. Soon that wasn’t enough. It led to massive deforestation.
Then we moved on to burning coal. Coal was more dense than wood, so it was easier to transport long distances. It could prevent the deforestation that was a problem with wood.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/wrigleyfig1-e1346123057549.gif
Wind energy for powering boats and wind turbines and water energy never amounted to much, before coal came along. Tony Wrigley, in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, points out that the concentration of values as well as the profits Brishish coal mines were making allowed paved roads to be built to the mines. These paved roads (probably paved with cobble stones) facilitated commerce, and allowed other businesses to grow up along the road.
Coal facilitated the building of modern hydroelectric dams, because coal could be used to make concrete and steel turbines. The first modern hydroelectric dam was built in 1882, according to National Geographic.
Oil was added next. Work on developing oil resources began in earnest once cheap=to-produce coal in Europe became a problem, about the time of World War I and World War II. In fact, lack of adequate energy resources appear to be major causes of those wars. Oil proved to be very helpful as a transportation fuel.
It was only with coal and oil in place that it made sense to ramp up the use of natural gas resource, because it needed lots of pipelines. These pipelines, to be made and installed, required coal and oil. Otherwise (and to some extent even now), natural gas was simply a byproduct of oil extraction that needed to be burned off because it was too much of a brother to deal with.
Nuclear was an add-on after World War II, partly because it used the same fuel as needed for bomb making. Also, concrete and steel, need for the nuclear power plants, could be made with coal. Materials could be transported with oil. Paved roads, which could be used for transporting materials used in constructing big power plants, were made possible by coal (concrete) and oil (asphalt; transport of materials).
I think of coal and oil as the basic fuels. Everything else depends on them. Coal is especially important, because it is inexpensive to extract and widely available. With coal, we can make concrete and steel. Without those materials, we have big problems. Electricity can be used to convert pig iron into steel, but basic pig iron still seems to use coal, most of the time, even today.
Ah that’s what you meant. Churning out nuclear power plants surely requires fossil fuels today, but are you claiming it’s an everlasting cycle? (as in we couldn’t use nuclear process heat for such production from the new reactors to replace fossil fuels)
Wind and solar, as far as I can see, produce pretty much no “net energy.” So, from that perspective, it is pretty much a permanent perspective.
Also, there are a lot of specific things that are needed, like paved roads to transport goods over. Back before concrete roads and asphalt roads, people made roads out of cobble stones. Without oil for asphalt and coal for concrete, we are pretty much back to cobblestones for paving. There will be lots of jobs for people creating stones of the right size and bringing them to the right place for paving. But it doesn’t make for very efficient transportation. I cannot see how with electricity alone, we can keep today’s roads.
Stress…..must be kidding…
Signs of stress in leveraged credit are ‘numerous and multiplying,’ warns Bank of America
Joy Wiltermuth
MarketWatchOctober 27, 2019, 10:00 AM EDT
Cracks have formed in the roughly $1.2 trillion leverage loan market that could bring the sector closer to a “point of no return” should conditions in this corner of corporate finance further deteriorate, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts warned.
Debt-laden U.S. companies have turned to the leveraged loan market in droves over the past decade for easy credit with fewer strings attached, but the past 12 months have seen a sharp drop in appetite for this type of debt and more recent indications point to the potential for long-feared defaults to spike.
“We are seeing numerous new signs of tightening credit conditions just in the past few weeks and months, ranging from wide market bifurcation, to prevalence of downgrades, to rising distress, to lower availability of capital for the lowest rated names,” wrote a team of Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts led by Oleg Melentyev, in a Friday note to clients.
“We believe these are very important developments that deserve our full attention; their further deterioration from here could indeed move us closer to the point of no return, where the forces of a cyclical turn become irreversible”, they said.
Red flags have been raised in recent years by credit rating agencies, regulators, the International Monetary Fund, and even by bankers in the business about dangers of the leveraged lending boom ending badly.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/signs-of-stress-in-leveraged-credit-are-numerous-and-multiplying-warns-bank-of-america-2019-10-27?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo
Getting into debt is like Crack, the more you do, the harder it is to STOP….
And it seems we are getting real Stupid with it…
Rest in Peace Crackhead Bob….died 2016…thanks for the memories on Howard Stern
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x62tBYmggGw
The big issue I see is that with lower interest rates, there is less motivation to lend to companies with potential problems. The article says,
Not sure if this one is up or not, electrical failure on a massive scale, third one in recent history, second one in a week. I believe in optimism, this man sure has it .”These are difficult calls,” Newsom added at a Napa press conference. “But a society as industrious and entrepreneurial and innovative as ours should not have to face a choice between public safety and public blackouts. We can do both together. And that is what path we are on.”
Link to article:
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/california-fires-spark-mandatory-evacuations-wineries-burn-winds-hit-93-mph
This is the state with the largest economy in the US and I suppose the good news is only 4% of the population is without power, still it has to be hell for those living in these areas, you have to have some empathy for what they are going through. We are Americans, we need to begin fixing things as was done at Oroville Reservoir, as on this site, we can disagree but we need to stop bickering.
Things are happening as we transition into the limits of growth, and it seems to be global.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/over-1-million-people-take-chilean-streets-protest-billionaire-president
Corny as it sounds, it feels as though fundamental change to our social fabric is occurring in real time.
Thoughts?
Dennis L.
“For now, the world remains anaesthetised by waves of monetary easing, which shored up financial institutions against systemic failure 10 years ago. It has also, more recently, dulled the pain of trade wars. But it cannot conceal the harm being done to the vital organs of finance.
“…ironically, some measures designed to shore up big banks have pushed borrowers into the hands of unsafe lenders.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3034616/how-wave-risky-lending-has-set-world-another-financial-crisis
“Titanic iceberg of world debt could sink the economy.”
Also,
“Lower yields have forced insurance companies, pension funds and other institutional investors to invest in riskier and less liquid securities. As a result, they have become a major source of funding for non-financial firms, which in turn facilitates a rise in corporate debt burdens.”
“Soaring wholesale meat prices in China sparked by the African swine fever epidemic are threatening a crisis in the nation’s food retail sector, which has struggled to pass on the bulk of the increases to consumers.
“Pork prices were nearly 159 per cent higher in October than a year earlier, more than double the retail price rise of nearly 73 per cent…”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/014a0f72-f642-11e9-a79c-bc9acae3b654
“Profits at Chinese industrial enterprises continued to contract as the economy slows and factory deflation deepens.
“Industrial profits dropped 5.3% in September… growing deflationary pressure continued to weigh on corporate profits and their debt servicing ability.
“Companies’ earning power will likely remain depressed in the coming month amid weak demand.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-10-27/china-s-industrial-profit-widens-drop-on-economy-deflation
“An international forum aimed at slashing excess steel production has been scrapped, after China said it had done enough to reduce global capacity.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3034753/global-steel-forum-scrapped-china-says-it-has-done-more-its
I can see why China would complain about the steel result:
“China has slashed total steel production capacity by more than 150 million tonnes since 2016, or 114 per cent of the global steel capacity cut … and China has redeployed 280,000 steel workers, which is more than the combined deployed number of steel workers in the US, the EU and Japan”
Cutting back means cutting back in China more than anywhere else. I am sure China thinks, “What is the point of the forum, if only China gets cut back?”
Who’s next….EVERYONE
We Screwed Up Detroit. Now It’s Puerto Rico’s Turn
Jodie Adams Kirshner
https://news.yahoo.com/screwed-detroit-now-puerto-ricos-091823442.html
the money they were promised. A pure application of the law would have left pensioners with nothing until more sophisticated financial lenders had been paid back in full. Detroit’s leaders and the seven members of Puerto Rico’s oversight board recognized that reductions in retirees’ incomes in favor of returns to investors would have left local pensioners with less money to spend in the local economy and more dependent on costly public services.
No one should be fooled, however. No matter how far officials go to mitigate such bad outcomes, bankruptcy does little to quickly alleviate the tragedies suffered by the residents of distressed places.
In Detroit, I’ve seen first-hand how bankruptcy primarily provides a way to reduce the cost of servicing debt when higher levels of government refuse to step in to offer support. For residents, bankruptcy can exacerbate hardships that might not otherwise have been inevitable. A better tool for turning around a struggling economy would focus more directly on offering opportunities to residents, whose rising fortunes would buoy the economic fortunes of where they live.
As in Detroit, the ramifications of Puerto Rico’s challenges have fallen for years on its dwindling population, and the ensuing human struggles have intensified the island’s difficulties, just as they did Detroit’s.
Even as individual poverty aggregated into limited tax bases and expressed itself in municipal budget shortfalls, to stave off more drastic interventions both governments, unable to pay their debts, instituted harsh austerity measures.
Puerto Ricans now pay far more for utilities, taxes, and healthcare than mainland Americans, despite the fact that three times as many Puerto Ricans live in poverty.
Austerity, meanwhile, has made education as a path to economic mobility there increasingly tenuous, as a quarter of local schools have closed, and funding cuts have decimated the local university system. With jobs increasingly scarce, many residents have fled, and their departures have left fewer people—increasingly elderly—to pay into the local economy. The remaining taxpayers have also had to foot the bill for billions paid to lawyers and consultants for their work on the bankruptcy. Following bankruptcy, the burden of maintaining a balanced budget, likely through reduced service expenditures and increased fee income, will also fall on them.
Once in motion the downward spiral is unstoppable
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=edKRSo2toT8
Island nations have a terrible time keeping the cost of energy supplies reasonable. Imported oil is expensive for producing electricity. Also, a lot of energy is used in shipping. Wind and solar don’t work well.
Puerto Rico is another area (not really country) that is near collapse. It is one of the areas that gets squeezed out, as world energy supply per capita no longer rises enough.
I recall Jamaica defaulted in 2013 and Barbados has been struggling. They defaulted on their bonds last year (having at that time the world’s fourth highest debt to GDP ratio), then got stung for an outrageous $27m consulting fee from some parasitic financial advisory firm.
Looks like they’ve finally agreed terms with their external creditors:
https://barbadostoday.bb/2019/10/18/barbados-agrees-on-terms-with-external-creditor-committee/
Did I read the word Deflation!?
Profits at Chinese industrial enterprises continued to contract as the economy slows and factory deflation deepens.
Industrial profits dropped 5.3% in September, according to the National Bureau of Statistics on Sunday.
While industrial production picked up in September, growing deflationary pressure continued to weigh on corporate profits and their debt servicing ability. Companies’ earning power will likely remain depressed in the coming month amid weak demand.
“The larger slide in September was due to a faster decline in industrial product prices and a slower growth in sales,” the bureau said in a statement released with the data.
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Yinan Zhao in Beijing at yzhao300@bloomberg.net;Emma Dong in Shanghai at edong10@bloomberg.net
No what do we do now, I wonder?
There was another article today (Oct. 28), essentially coming to the same point. The issue is falling commodity prices of many kinds, including oil, coal and gas. Materials are also affected.
The big indirect issue that this article mentions is that industrial profits are falling.
These factories have large fixed costs. But customer demand is not rising the way it was before. In some cases, such as for cars, it is falling. The low demand leads to low commodity prices as well as a need for a lower number of finished goods, such as vehicles. The factories cannot charge enough to cover their fixed costs as well. Factory profits fall.
New Rules same as the Old Rules….whatever it takes to make it move at a profit!
Bloomberg) — Russia, one of the largest producers of the world’s favorite ship fuel, may delay local adoption of more stringent rules targeting air pollution from commercial vessels.
Ship owners and operators worldwide are preparing to switch to using fuel oil with a sulfur content of no more than 0.5% starting Jan. 1, when the new International Maritime Organization rules take effect. But Russia’s energy and transportation ministries are looking to postpone the stricter standards for vessels operating within the country and four other former Soviet republics until 2024, Energy Minister Alexander Novak said in response to questions sent by Bloomberg.
The new rules, known as IMO 2020, “will lead to a sharp hike in the price of fuel for the river fleet and river-sea vessels, which operate mainly in Russia’s territorial waters,” Novak said. The energy and transportation ministries are seeking “to prevent a higher financial pressure on the nation’s shipowners,” he said. However, Russia will comply with IMO 2020 standards in international waters, Novak said.
The potential delay would affect the five-member Eurasian Economic Union, which also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia. Of the five countries, only Russia and Kazakhstan are coastal states
I have a hard time believing that most ship owners will really begin using a higher cost fuel beginning January 1, 2020. If they do, they will have a hard time recovering their higher costs, leading to falling profits in the shipping industry. More marginal shipping will be cut off, leading to fewer needed boats and fewer needed employees.
I would not be surprised if other countries follow Russia’s lead and do something similar. Or perhaps they will just look the other way and not enforce the rules the have been put in place.
It seems that our leaders feel differently as far as BAU lifespan….
Beijing’s new $63 bln mega-airport begins international flights
ReutersOctober 26, 2019, 9:44 PM EDT
BEIJING, Oct 27 (Reuters) – Beijing’s new $63 billion Daxing airport began its first scheduled international flights on Sunday as it ramped up operations to help relieve pressure on the city’s existing Capital airport.
Shaped like a phoenix – though to some observers it is more reminiscent of a starfish – the airport was designed by famed Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, and formally opened in late September ahead of the Oct. 1 celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
It boasts four runways and is expected to handle up to 72 million passengers a year by 2025, eventually reaching 100 million.
And here in the USA
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. – EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. (AP) – More than two decades ago when a mega entertainment and shopping complex was being conceived on a vast swath of swamp land in New Jersey, the iPhone didn’t exist, Amazon was only selling books online and malls were where you went for all your shopping needs.
Now, after endless fits and starts and billions of dollars spent, American Dream is officially opening its doors to the public as the second largest mall in the country, and third largest in North America. It will showcase 3 million square feet of leasable space dedicated to more than a dozen entertainment attractions like a 16-story indoor ski slope, rollercoaster, waterpark and eventually 450 retail, food and specialty shops.
The big question is: Who will come?
https://www.actionnewsjax.com/amp/news/business/massive-american-dream-mall-to-open-but-will-shoppers-come/1001374181
Amid that new reality, American Dream is looking to draw 45 million to 50 million visitors in its first year. Entertainment will account for more than half of its space, including attractions like a bunny field and an aviary. There will also be a doggy day care and a luxury wing, where shoppers can sip champagne and sample caviar as they wait for their designer handbags to be wrapped.
“You can make it your backyard playground if you live in Manhattan or even if you’re in New Jersey,” said Ken Downing, chief creative officer for Triple Five Group, the mall’s developer. “It’s a staycation. So, it’s a little bit of competing with mindset and emotion, far more than a property or even Disneyland
What were they thinking?????
I remember doing some consulting work in New Jersey
for an IT firm (they went bankrupt and deservedly so),
and came away feeling that the swamps were the best
features of the state. Everywhere else, pedestrians
were an endangered species.
LOL!
When I was growing up near there in New Jersey my buddies and our minibikes would ride the trails in the Meadowlands and had some grand fun there without building a billion dollar amusement park! And it was very safe, other than a wild pack of dogs here or there and the foul smells from the dump site😭
The old Beijing airport isn’t huge, as I recall. So I can understand something larger. But this sounds large, given where we are headed.
In the US, we have a huge amount of mall space already, way too much of it empty. We will see how it does.
From Slashdot:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard:
According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the U.S. military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes. The senior U.S. government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century. The report was commissioned by General Mark Milley, Trump’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the highest-ranking military officer in the country (the report also puts him at odds with Trump, who does not take climate change seriously.)
The report, titled Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, was launched by the U.S. Army War College in partnership with NASA in May at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. The report was commissioned by Gen. Milley during his previous role as the Army’s Chief of Staff. It was made publicly available in August via the Center for Climate and Security, but didn’t get a lot of attention at the time. The two most prominent scenarios in the report focus on the risk of a collapse of the power grid within “the next 20 years,” and the danger of disease epidemics. Both could be triggered by climate change in the near-term, it notes. The report also warns that the U.S. military should prepare for new foreign interventions in Syria-style conflicts, triggered due to climate-related impacts. Bangladesh in particular is highlighted as the most vulnerable country to climate collapse in the world.
The report recommends the U.S. military should take advantage of the Arctic’s hydrocarbon resources and new transit routes to repel Russian encroachment.
“But without urgent reforms, the report warns that the U.S. military itself could end up effectively collapsing as it tries to respond to climate collapse,” adds Motherboard. “It could lose capacity to contain threats in the U.S. and could wilt into ‘mission failure’ abroad due to inadequate water supplies.”
This is not the only place with serious concerns about the future.
A lot of people read reports based on the same models. All of the models omit the overshoot and collapse problem. They are interesting, but I doubt that they are anywhere close to correct.
When telling people about the problem ahead, the International Energy Agency felt that they had to choose between two very different stories. The Peak Oil folks said we were running out of oil. The Climate Change folks said that if we burned all of the fossil fuels that were available, the earth would earth would badly overheat.
It turns out that there was a different story that was the real story, if they had stopped to look at the situation more closely. We seem to be reaching “collapse” of “overshoot and collapse.” This looks like “Peak Everything” instead of “Peak Oil.” It is characterized by low commodity prices and failing governments. Wars are a common outcome. Epidemics are as well. This problem seems to be near at hand. It is the same problem that many economies through the ages have encountered. But this is not a nice story, and doesn’t fit with the story politicians want to tell. No one wants to say, “Resources per capita are falling too low. We are encountering the same problems that people throughout the ages have encountered. Our problem is overall EROEI that is falling too low.”
Politicians wanted a story that seemed to suggest that our problems are fixable. So, at the urging of politicians, models were built assuming that the economy could grow forever and that energy consumption isn’t really needed for economic growth. These assumptions allowed them to get to “climate is our biggest and most urgent problem” and “we can fix it if we just try.”
But this is nonsense. The economic part of the climate change models makes no sense. The models assume that far more fossil fuels (particularly coal) can be extracted than can really be extracted. Commodity prices fall too low, cutting off extraction.
The earth and its ecosystem is a self-organizing system that can and will take care of itself. If humans are causing too much of a problem, humans will likely be eliminated in the next round of extinctions. Humans don’t need to feel guilty about what we have done, in “causing” climate change. We are dissipative structures, acting according to the laws of physics. We don’t have the power to change the system, the way politicians and the IEA would like us to think we can.
A wonderfully clear summation Gail.
“Humans don’t need to feel guilty about what we have done, in “causing” climate change. We are dissipative structures, acting according to the laws of physics.” COMPLETELY DISAGREE. Humans ARE the cause of the on-going great sixth extinction (really extermination). In a sense, most extinctions of large mammals have been caused by humans for the past 10,000 years. And it only gets worse, ramping up big time with humanity wiping out 60% of animal populations since 1970. The question should be “can the human species collapse without killing off much more of the natural ecosystem. We are the problem, and we should fell guilty.
Humans are part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem keeps changing, and parts of it collapse from time to time. I saw an AP article today called, Fossil trove shows life’s fast recovery after extinction. It talks about how quickly the world ecosystem bounced back after a meteor hit 66 million years ago. In fact, new, more complex forms of life arose after the old ones were wiped out.
We don’t understand what is ahead. Our imagination runs wild with all of the bad things that happen. We feel guilty because we humans must have caused the problems. The problem is the laws of physics. We have to eat. Species of all kinds are programed to want to have offspring. Politicians, with the help of economists who work for them, have developed a story making humans responsible for all of the ills of the world. The real story is not that way. We don’t need to feel guilty, any more than a lion eating a lamb needs to feel guilty. This is simply the way the ecosystem works and evolves.
What we are guilty of is undermining the means for prevailing as a species due to our “monkey do” dominance hierarchies and lust for more power and offspring on a finite planet.
FF’s exacerbated the predicament of our psychology by giving us the means to reduce our complex interdependence with the ecosystem on Gaia and replacing that with a simplistic dependency towards the dead fossils of IC and in doing so creating the modern day savage hiding behind the shallow veneer of IC dimly lit by the screen of a smartphone in an display of pretentious nihilism.
What you say would be true if we did not know that our metabolic rate was too high and suddenly collapsed without knowing the reason for it. Unfortunately we know about our overshooting problem quite well and we also know what we could try to avoid it, even when it is very hard, indeed.
People frequently use laws of physics or our DNA as a reason for inaction. Meaning something like a brain does not exist.
“Politicians, with the help of economists who work for them, have developed a story making humans responsible for all of the ills of the world.” We ARE the cause of MOST of the ills of the world. “Ills” being destruction of habitat, increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, hunting species to extinction and pollution, all because humans are growing like a global cancer on this planet. No one species has ever done this. How can you not see this ? ? ?
That article stops at 700,000 years but about 1 million years seems reasonable to get to the wide variety of plants and animals that we saw until humans really got into dismantling that recovery, just a couple of centuries ago. Of course, providing some life survives, ecosystems will eventually reach a climax state again. This is irrelevant, though, to the crisis that humans and all other current species (it’s too late for many recently extinct or now non-viable species) face, due almost entirely to human behaviour.
Humans should feel guilty because it’s not just a story; humans actually have caused all of the environmental crises that have arisen over the last couple of centuries. However, though humans are guilty, they are just acting out their intrinsic behaviour patterns. We have enabled the conditions in which our actions became inevitable, so I guess there is more guilt there, too.
Guilty or not, should or need not; soon all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Man is no lion but has reason and the lion has no SUV to drive to the supermarket to buy gatchets from China. The lion is hardwired. Man runs on software called culture. We are proud of destructive systems still. Once they fail, we will change the OS. The new is alreasy there!
While my perspective is different from yours, I do agree that humans will likely be eliminated in the next round of extinctions. The likelihood could be reduced, though, if humans change their activities to be more sustainable. But, then, this is not likely to happen. 😉
Aren’t humans part of the earth’s ecosystem?
Yep, and in celebration of that fact, in the state of Washington compost made from human remains is going to be allowed in the veggie patch.
https://www.businessinsider.com/washington-state-human-compost-bodies-into-soil-2019-5
🙂 Like it’s something new, rather than how it’s always been in most places.
I meant that human remains have been enriching land forever. But selling and marketing the product does seem extreme.
I could have saved them the trouble:
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
(Revelation vi:8)
That’s a new one: the US military unable to intervene abroad due to drought. They seem to have a sense of reality, the authors….
I assume they’ve missed the worst part: Denial
in any developed society that is or has been on an expansionist curve, the military will be the biggest consumer of primary energy.
when that curve starts to drop, the military will still try to maintain themselves, as will the political elite they support
they will drain energy resources from wherever they can to do this, while denying reality. They must continue with the pretence of ‘infinite growth’. Check current costs of F35s etc etc, while 40m people are on SNAP and 0000s homeless.
Military hardware is an economic dead end. But few can admit that.
Nations must have armies
This makes internal conflict inevitable, as other interests conflict for essential resources to sustain lifestyles for a little longer.
In other words secession and civil war becomes certain, as each side denies what is actually going on. (climate change is a hoax, Jesus will return and fix things)
It is that denial that will make life very unpleasant for all of us.
“Nations must have armies”
The Roman Empire faced exactly this problem, in the time of Septimus Serverus. He extended the boundaries of the empire, and then discovered, first that he needed more troops (three more legions), and secondly that he couldn’t raise them. The answer: hire barbarians. The rest, as they say, is history.
The US seems to think drones and client states can replace barbarians. I think they are wrong.
I find it interesting how people can get a thought or idea into their head, then find all the reasons to back up their ideas without trying to think outside the square for alternatives.
Of all the different issues that our host writes about, the ‘intermittency problem’ is one where I disagree.
The first simple solution, creation of liquid fuels has already been mentioned by Keith. Another part of the solution is to have larger grids. The larger the grids and more interconnected the various grids (perhaps one world wide grid?) then the less intermittency is a problem. The sun is always shining somewhere and the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Another aspect is ‘battery storage’, but somehow all the conversation resides around chemical batteries with a limited life instead of pumped hydro using seawater.
Here in Australia we have the Nullarbor plain that sits 70-90 metres above sea level and is adjacent to the Southern Ocean. It is essentially flat and covers about 200,000 km2. An earth berm of 10 metres in height around an area of just 1000 km2, and a water level of just 8 metres depth would contain the energy of around 1,400 Gwh.
Considering the Australian Eastern grid produces and uses around 25 Gw, the intermittency issue disappears. Also the average solar insolation of the deserts of most of Australia is an average of 9 hours/day without much variance between seasons.
A capacity factor of 37% means the payback of energy invested in solar in such places is very short and the eroei of solar and pumped seawater hydro well over 10:1 given the various figures bandied around the net for energy cost of building solar farms. The energy cost of the pumped seawater hydro would be less than 10% of the energy cost of either the solar farms or the transmission lines. I’ve done the math on it all, easily done from an energy perspective.
The current thinking in this country for pumped hydro, talks in terms of Mw and Mwh and not Gw and Gwh, plus the plan is to use the Snowy hydro scheme with fresh water, where the runoff has fallen by 33% over the last couple of decades and the dam capacity is currently at about 20% due to prolonged ‘unusual’ drought.
I am not sure I am following everything you are saying.
Water sitting around in a huge man-made lake or pond does nothing but evaporate. Then it is gone.
Pumped hydro involves two lakes at different elevations. Water is pumped up to the higher lake, when there is an excess of electricity, and a desire to store the electricity for a short time. A very small amount of time-shifting is possible (hours or days), if the water is allowed to flow back down and create more generation later.
I think the problem is still a problem. Activity does not only follow the time when the sun is available.
It’s a neat idea. Pump saltwater into a huge artificial saltwater lake. This is potentially big enough to be a seasonable storage method.
There is something similar on Lake Michigan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant
Evaporation loss . . . I happen to know that a pond in Tucson evaporates 5 feet a year. If you are trying for seasonal storage, a smaller, deeper lake might be better. It would not be hard to model.
An operating salt water pumped storage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_Yanbaru_Seawater_Pumped_Storage_Power_Station
Examples the late Roger Andrews did on Euan Mearns blog. Mostly he scaled current generation to get numbers.
http://euanmearns.com/how-chiles-electricity-sector-can-go-100-renewable/
http://euanmearns.com/how-californias-electricity-sector-can-go-100-renewable/
Comments on the blog are informative as well, IMO. Big problem is usage. Most of the time it is money down the drain as it only gets used once or twice a year, if that.
T2M
The southern ocean is the ‘bottom’ lake. The Nullarbor plain is an area of 200,000km2, right next to the ocean, but 70-90 metres above sea level. There are a lot of cliffs down to the ocean.
These areas have an average of 9 hours/day of sun without much variance between seasons, so no need for ‘seasonal storage’.
I’m sure there are many similar places around the world where massive pumped hydro would work. Chemical batteries with a life of 7-10 years are a joke by comparison.
Massive grids that are needed with Keiths ‘space solar’ will also help with the intermittency problem of solar and wind. Combined with massive pumped seawater hydro and renewables are a possible solution if not for all the resource limits etc.
“Massive grids that are needed with Keiths ‘space solar’”
You are right. Microwave optics and economy of scale will drive power satellite installations into very large sizes, 5 GW perhaps up to 20 GW. Grand Coulee generates 7 GW, Three Gorges 22 GW.
If power satellites are constructed, it’s hard to see what the long term mix of sources would be. The nature of power satellites is that shutting them off saves nothing. If they ever got to be more than baseload, it would make sense (after filling up pumped storage) to make hydrogen for F/T plants to make liquid fuels (or plastics).
The US military has gotten involved. If you go here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/power-satellite-economics and click on the Jaffe article (second in the list), you can download a 100-page report. It pays quite a bit of attention to economic issues. Unfortunately, unless you are up on power satellite issues, it will be a really difficult read.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URprZKBJa9g
Yes, this is all soaked in BAU and external inputs, but one has to wonder if there comes a time when genuine interest into why and what they can offer for low-shallow surplus world survival eventually spreads more widely..
Reminds of the prolific author and life long farmer, Gene Logsdpn, who died on 2016 from cancer.
In “Amish Economics,” Logsdon praises Amish farming practices for producing more income per acre through low overhead, thrift, self-sufficiency, the use of draft animals, and diversified farm income. Amish community self-help even enables them to replace in one day large barns destroyed by tornadoes. From pasture to woodlot, farm pond to barnyard, the essays in AT NATURE’S PACE remind us of the satisfactions of traditional farming practices
https://www.enotes.com/topics/natures-pace
Tried to find the article form online but could not unfortunately.
I did find while goggle searching the Amish seemm o have a population explosion, imagine that!
The Amish population in the U.S. numbers more than 270,000 and is growing rapidly, due to large family size (seven children on average) and a church-member retention rate of approximately 80%.”
Oh well, there is always something that goes astray
I wonder how they will deal with the bulge in births: it would make for too many excess hands on the farms. Do they buy more land? I suppose the problem is a little down the line.
At least they are having some fun, as well as being models of hard-working frugality……
The US has been steadily decreasing the number of acres farmed for a long time. Decreased ~10% in the last 70 years.
The northeast has lots of forest with stone boundary walls running through them from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Amish buying land or converting land back to farm is not that hard.
Funny thing is when I travel through those areas they are all generally happier than people in cities. I think they are nuts, happy nuts, but nuts.
T2M
A lot of the young people end up leaving, because farms cannot be subdivided. Perhaps a little birth control would be helpful.
Life in the Kali Yuga:
”Kali Yuga: The final age. It is the age of darkness and ignorance. People become sinners and lack virtue. They become slaves to their passions and are barely as powerful as their earliest ancestors in the Satya Yuga. Society falls into disuse and people become liars and hypocrites. Knowledge is lost and scriptures are diminished. Humans eat forbidden and dirty food. The environment is polluted, water and food become scarce. Wealth is heavily diminished. Families become non-existent. By the end of Kali Yuga the average lifespan of humans will be as low as 20 years”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga
Yep, that is the life we have as savages protected from each other behind the thin veil of IC.
https://data.whicdn.com/images/210427586/large.jpg
The more I read about how technology is speeding up something, saving time and money to companies and other fantastic things for the profits, the less I tend to believe it, when I see the ageing populations and the onset of and the continuing depopulation from the periferies to the centers.
The lies are accumulating…
Companies, like the aristocrats of the past, can prosper while society collapses – up to a certain point.
It;s dreadfully hard to get excited about new technology these days, if you’ve the smallest degree of foresight and sense of irony…..
“About 41% of the global population are under 24. And they’re angry.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/26/young-people-predisposed-shake-up-established-order-protest
“Perhaps these protests will one day merge into a joined-up global revolt against injustice, inequality, environmental ruin and oppressive powers-that-be. What helps protect us is the noisy, life-affirming dissent of the young.”
And then you woke up! These are peak oil protests in the Year of Fire.
Hilarious Grauniad tripe as ever.
The old fantasy, since 1789, of Revolution! (TM)
Well, Spain has more protests than almost any other country, and it achieves absolutely nothing: just ends up as a regular pastime in which you prove which side you are on to all the other people on your side, how cool. etc.
Satisfying for the organisers who like herding people about…..
“HURRAH for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”
William Butler Yeats (1865 to 1939)
“Solar is particularly bad for providing enough power.”
Which is why you want to make hydrocarbons from intermittent PV. It’s a reasonably efficient way to store energy, and we already have the infrastructure. This scheme needs a full analysis which is probably beyond what I could do.
“environmental ruin . . . dissent of the young.”
Of course, the excessive numbers of young are the reason for the ruin. On the other hand, the vast numbers of people around may find answers.
At this point, due to people moving to cities, I think the actual areas occupied by people is falling (Africa is probably an exception).
In “The Clinic Seed” the AIs made uploading (and staying in that state) so attractive that the entire population of Africa did it and humans effectively became biologically extinct.
“At this point, due to people moving to cities, I think the actual areas occupied by people is falling (Africa is probably an exception).”
Around 2pm the other week, outside our little local railway station at a quiet time of day, a little fox was standing, begging food from people. They were charmed. An old lady gave it some segments of her tangerine. It ate them. It stood there looking at other people. A young lady reached into her car and pulled out a long flapjack. It was so big the fox dropped it at first but then picked it up and disappeared behind a hedge to eat it, before reappearing in order to beg from more people. I was flabbergasted. I’d never seen such a calmly fearless fox before.
“calmly fearless fox”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox
Looks like the one you saw is well on the way to being self-domesticated.
Isnt it silly believing we are only digital information?
The human genome can be encoded using binary representation. Given a powerful computer, it is thus possible to simulate the whole humanoid from impregnation to birth.
The importance is the process and not how it is represented.
yes, of course it is…
“digital information”
The story’s background was that people could go into and out of the uploaded state. That may or may not be possible, but I would not want to do a one-way upload–even though Hans Moravec likes the idea.
it never will be possible…
a human being is much more than a human genome…
just look up “human microbiome”…
and…
it seems quite unreasonable to be able to make a digital copy of the human mind, which is constantly shifting and changing…
nice fodder for sci fi though…
like human colonies on Mars and even out of this solar system…
it’s really just humans flexing their imaginations, because doing that often feels good…
“it never will be possible…”
I am not that certain. Lots of things that were not possible are now common. Consider your smartphone from the viewpoint of 1950.
“a human being is much more than a human genome…”
That’s certainly true. We grow minds that are way more complicated than the genome.
Generally we have a flawed intuition about the self. The singularity of the personal experience is an illusion, just as all other mental sensations are a phenomena of the information processing in the brain.
You are you, but at the same time you are everyone else (and no one) embodied as a spatiotemporal entity in the universe. We all share the same basic principles and processing systems – the brain and the genome which give rise to it. Then are we truly unique? I would conclude not.
Thus uploading and downloading yields no difference. Existence is nothing singular and unique. It just appears that way. Our intuition and perspective is terribly misleading.
Agreed. Give me a photon stream and a half silvered mirror, and I can generate true random numbers. No computer can do that. The photon is probably the simplest thing in the known universe, and cannot be simulated by a computer. Yet there are people who believe a computer can simulate one of the most complex things in the known universe: us.
I have followed the “machine intelligence” research since the beginning, and remain convinced it is a fool’s errand.
Exactly. Locusts protesting about environmental ruin would be funny if it were not so tragic.
Perhaps we shall end up with a pastoral pagan feminist gynocracy, with Saint Greta as High Priestess of Gaia. And on sober reflection, we could do a lot worse. For an illustration, check out Thomas Cole’s painting: http://www.artnet.com/artists/thomas-cole/dream-of-arcadia-TntrMVcRqqDe0FEBK2s0HA2
Help a brother out….BAU Baby….crybabies
https://news.yahoo.com/government-loophole-gave-oil-companies-191426465.html?bcmt=1
U.S. government has lost billions of dollars of oil and gas revenue to fossil-fuel companies because of a loophole in a decades-old law, a federal watchdog agency said Thursday, offering the first detailed accounting of the consequences of a misstep by lawmakers that is expected to continue costing taxpayers for decades to come.
The loophole dates from an effort in 1995 to encourage drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by offering oil companies a temporary break from paying royalties on the oil produced. However, the rule was poorly written, the very politicians who originally championed it have acknowledged, and the temporary reprieve was accidentally made permanent on some wells.
As a result, some of the biggest oil companies in the world, including Chevron, Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and others, have avoided paying at least $18 billion in royalties on oil and gas drilled since 1996, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that works for Congress. The companies, which hold government leases to drill in the Gulf, continue to extract oil and gas from those wells while not being required to pay royalties, a right the industry has gone to court to defend.
Roughly 22% of oil production from federal leases in the Gulf of Mexico was royalty-free in 2018 because of the loophole, the Interior Department said…
Wasn’t their intention…..just a little oversight….
“However, the rule was poorly written, …”
No, the rule was written by the oil companies, and rubber stamped by their tame bought congresscritters. Hang them. By the neck. Until dead.
Please proo-ceed.
No Recession. In sight…..said the blind man….
Fed Seen Cutting Rates Next Week and Then Hitting Pause Button
Christopher Condon and Chris Middleton
Bloomberg
Back YahooFINANCE
Fed Seen Cutting Rates Next Week and Then Hitting Pause Button
Christopher Condon and Chris Middleton
BloombergOctober 25, 2019, 12:01 AM EDT
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Fed Seen Cutting Rates Next Week and Then Hitting Pause Button
(Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve officials will signal they’re likely to take a break from cutting interest rates after lowering them again next week, according to a majority of economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
In an Oct. 21-24 poll of 40 economists, 85% said they anticipate the Federal Open Market Committee will reduce rates by a quarter percentage point when it wraps up a two-day meeting in Washington on Wednesday. That would lower the target range for the Fed’s benchmark rate to 1.5%-1.75%.
In addition, 56% of respondents said in the event of such a cut, policy makers would telegraph, either in their policy statement or through Chairman Jerome Powell’s post-meeting press conference, that they are likely to pause for some time before making another rate move.
“It might well be a hawkish cut as Powell will likely signal some resistance to cut rates more,” said Thomas Costerg, senior U.S. economist at Pictet Wealth Management in Geneva.
The Fed has already lowered rates twice this year — in July and September — not because officials forecast a steep downturn but because the risks of such a slump have mounted. Powell last month compared that to taking out “insurance.”…
Boy, what are they going to do when there is one
Fly helicopters with money, perhaps?
OK, many here fit the bill….BAU may keep going …so get with the program..
Retirement planning can be so daunting that many younger Americans simply ignore it.
“They’re sticking their in the sand,” AJ Smith, vice president of content and financial education at SmartAsset, told Yahoo Finance recently. They think “this is going to be a depressing conversation, I’m not going to have it. I’m going to wait until later.”
Only three in 10 millennials started socking away early for retirement, while two-thirds said they need to catch up on saving, according to a recent study from TD Ameritrade. Those who don’t save early miss out out on their early contributions growing even more over their lifetimes
Most millennials don’t have high hopes for Social Security contributing to their retirement income. Four in five are concerned that Social Security won’t be around when they retire, according to a survey this year from TransAmerica.
Smith doesn’t believe Americans should depend on it either, characterizing whatever Social Security benefits they may get in the future as “gravy.”
“I think that’s the most empowering way to look at it because you feel like you’re in control of that,” she said. “You can control how much you’re saving and how much you’re spending now
I FEEL EMPOWERED….and the message of the whole article…work till you drop dead
Be it a part-time job or following a long-standing passion project that you didn’t have the bandwidth to pursue when working, now is the time to devote to your passions and explore strengths that were previously untapped and, in some cases, provide extra income.
Yes, my passion….they show a Old Guy working at Walmart….
Boy, are we living in the Magic Hour Time…wait till Reality hits
Amusing: stuff your money into our pension scam so that WE can collect on the commission and fees NOW!
The state schemes are just the same of course.
Pay 10% of your income to the Pastor of your church, collect on Eternal Life later…….etc.
Xabier, this is a problem that has troubled me for a long time, and for which I have no good ideas.
Barter was simple: I give you the chicken; you give me the firewood. Immediate, symmetrical, and robust. With money, it is a little more complex: I give you the chicken; you give me the Thaler. But as long as I remain confident that same thaler will buy me firewood, all is well.
The logic changes when the trade is asymmetric: I give you this today, you will give me that tomorrow. Or next week, or next year, or 20 years from now. But what if you renege?
That is exactly what happens. You pay into a “trust fund” for 40 years, and at the end of the day the fund is empty, and your savings have been stolen. You pay insurance for 20 years, and when you claim, the small print slams the door in your face. “If you weren’t alive you wouldn’t have developed cancer; therefore, your life is a preexistent condition and your health insurance is void.”
And, as so often, the biggest rogues on the block are governments, who break promises because they have squandered the wealth that might honour them. I would welcome your thoughts.
I recall the notorious film of the Greek pensioner who collapsed in the street crying, after trudging from bank to bank to get his miserable pension and being turned away. Said it all, did it not?
At that time, Merkel stated: ‘We left them a sufficient safety net’.
Old Spanish proverb: ‘Better a noble enemy, than a prince for a friend’. .
Princes, (the state), often break promises with impunity – because they can.
The time lag between payment towards a pension and collection is simply too long, above all in a declining economy. Investment in a brothel would give more certainty, and one could sit at the bar drinking champagne…..
“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” (Ps cxlvi:3)
Yes indeed, wisdom some three thousand years old. But in whom, then, is one to put ones trust?
My savings are in the most reputable bank in Singapore, in a Euro denominated account. But I still worry.
Religion has an answer: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal” (Matt xi:19). But that is a hard answer to live by.
The bedrock of capitalism is sound money and honest banking. Today, we have neither, and our so wonderful economy is a house built upon sand. And great will be the fall thereof.
So, gold, food, and durable non-electric goods? Or holidays and champagne?
Robert,
For me, the bedrock of capitalism and community for that matter are the people, people who have talents they are willing and able to exchange and an environment that allows extraction of embedded energy at a rate sufficient to sustain that community. We die alone, solo life is impossible and somewhere I read the average age of a mountain man at death was the late thirties.
We also have an obligation to move on when we can no longer contribute to our community, staying too long takes from the young.
We need simple rules that everyone can attempt to follow which probably means that too much individualism takes too much energy from the community. Life is sufficiently challenging in interpersonal relationships not to have “trigger” mines laying about. Perhaps the ultra individualists will be the mountain men of our time, dying alone.
It seems to be thus with the elites as well, they think one man is an island, one brilliant idea that made billions implies they know everything. Rules of civility are a pain, but overall they seem to make things much simpler and easier. Here in the US the political elites are certainly fighting more amongst themselves than serving a useful function. Were AI just to turn off the lights in their meeting rooms, it is doubtful anyone would miss them, a tax code that is about 70,000 pages long must certainly cover every possibility.
Personally, I have gone back to school to add to my skill set, I ran out of education, it is a challenge to slog through the first two years of college math once again after a 55 year break, humbling as well, but doable. Tough to read much technical information without diff eq and a good knowledge of programmable computers, damn things are amazing, I date from the slide rule era. Some years back I read that the manual skills such as a carpenter, machinist are the last to go; I have a small but well equipped machine shop, gold is a means of exchange, but everyone wants to kill you for it. Fixing/making something of value in the world this site describes might be of value. I chose areas that are totally apolitical also. Our wealth is between our ears, portable, to survive we need people who will give us hand when we need it and who in turn expect the same when their turn comes around. Coming from a Norwegian family, a plate of cookies received is a plate of cookies owed, the cooks gossip.
Those of you who are going back to the land, God bless you. I know that insects are disappearing from the earth, but the last holdouts circle around me in the garden, those in MN bite.
ATB,
Dennis L.
Banks, pensions plans, and insurance companies probably need to be added to your list of future rogues. Of course, governments sometimes supposedly insure these. Also, purchases of shares of stock that seemed to have value. Not to mention derivatives. And value land, which can no longer be used for its past purpose.
Actually, I think most of the benefits of religion are here on earth. Religious organizations give you ideas about how to live in the world today. How to treat your neighbor, for example, even if he poor or different from you. The need to forgive and move on, whether it is a mistake you yourself made or something someone else did, which you feel is wrong. The need for respect for others and their property. The ability to work together with others on projects to serve others.
Religious organizations tend to have meetings and other get togethers where a person can find friends. A huge problem today is loneliness. A person doesn’t need to just hang out in bars or vape joints to find friends. They get get a whole lot more person to person involvement than with online video games.
Religions make it clear that the only philosophy doesn’t need to be, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” If there happens to be post-death benefit, that is a plus.
The more interesting question is why humans have religions at all?
The tendency has to be rooted in the genes. At some time in the past, religion or something related to it was important for survival. Using evolutionary psychology I can account for a lot of human behavior. For example, capture-bonding and the various offshoots down to army basic training.
I don’t understand religions as well, but given that most of them are xenophobic memes, I suspect the trait to spread religious memes is tied up in the same psychological traits that lead to war.
“The more interesting question is why humans have religions at all?”
Perhaps because there is a kernel of truth in all of them, which is that we are fleeting physical manifestations of the one universal consciousness. Knowing yourself, experientially (as opposed to intellectually), as the latter is the fundamental goal of spiritual endeavour and the means for transcending your mortality.
“Be still and know that I am God.”
as far as we can tell, humans are the only species with awareness of deep past, present and far future
with that in mind, we have to have come from ‘somewhere’—ie the infinite umbilical cord stretches back to ”a beginning”. We see that at every birth. Thus we have various creation myths.
Gods had to be born of virgin mothers, or the sin-free part doesn’t work.
so if there was a beginning, then something/one had to have started it all
to have started it all, such a being has to have had super-natural powers–ie a god
ergo–if a god started it all, then the same god cannot intend for us to just ”die”. (because by definition ”he” is infallible. Or he wouldn’t be a god would he?) There must be a further ”grand plan” we don’t know about. (being mere mortals) which ”he” has in store for us as a reward for suffering through this life.
Hence ”the heaven” of our future to look forward to. The universal priestly promise.
You can apply the above to most major religions. It pretty much fits.
We humans think we know about the future. Now that we can make computer models, we especially think we know about the future. Ancient people thought that they knew about the future. But we don’t know that our guesses are any better than those of early humans.
If you haven’t seen it yet, this video does a great job explaining the problems of time shifting with renewables.
https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY
I listened to this video, now. I am fairly sure I have listened to it previously, but quite a bit of it I had forgotten.
The point that the narrator makes is that it is necessary to scale energy generation to provide enough in December. This means a whole lot of overbuilding. Solar is particularly bad for providing enough power. The video comes to very similar conclusions as my post Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work.
Thanks for a new post, Gail!
After following this site for a couple of years, let me try a summary of what kind of big picture i see painted: The history of economic growth and the social mobiliziation of groups such as the working class and the women in their fight for entitlements and recognition have emerged within the framework of an energy system, which operated with two causalities:
First, the most important driver of economic growth since the industrial revolution has been falling – inflation-adjusted – costs of energy services such as (food) heat, power, transport and light.
The fact that energy services became cheaper was linked to the transition from traditional energy sources, such as horse power and wood fuel, to fossil energy. From the end of the 19th century, electricity was also used as an energy carrier. Falling energy costs stimulated energy use. Yes, the fall in energy costs has more than offset the increase in energy consumption, so that energy services expenditure has accounted for an ever smaller share of GDP. Gail has pointed out this several times.
The second reason is that new energy sources have never replaced the old ones, but only come as an addition. Supplement has been the rule, not substitution. The oil did not fully replace the coal, but came as an add-on. In absolute quantities, today we use more biomass, hydro and wind power, coal, oil and gas than ever before in history. Only the relative composition of the energy mix has changed.
The various sources of energy do not stand on their own, but are mutually dependent on each other. Fossil energy is used to create wind turbines and solar cells, and oil extraction depends on electricity supply and a lot of electronic devices. Yes, could it not be said that new technologies driven by new energy sources in many ways made it easier to combat diminishing returns and thus extract more ressouces from old ones?
Must not the ultimate test for RE be ihow well they comply or fulfill this two «energetic laws»?
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy they are able to utilize. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. The scale has three designated categories:
A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet.
A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can use and control energy at the scale of its solar system.
A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
IC is a type 0 civilization. Just wait until we engineer the sh1t out of this place and hit the stars sucking them dry with our Sun Pipes. But first we must rid ourselves from a bad case of energy suckling fleas, which is the wastrel humanoid drones busying themselves with various forms of frippery.
How is someone classified as a “wastrel humanoid drone” (or not), and how would you define “frippery”?
And how have you earnt your exalted (if self-designated) status as arbiter in these matters?
He’s one of the Illuminati, taunting us.
Myself, I’m saving hard to do a bit of wastrelling, sounds like fun!
And I’m told I have rather a good line in frippery.
Kowalainen sounds like a sort of techno-utopian supremacist. Takes all sorts. 😀
Gail’s blog certainly attracts a wide variety of interesting people.
Yes.
https://www.liberaldictionary.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/hal-4260.jpg
“Gail’s blog certainly attracts a wide variety of interesting people.”
In my case, the connection goes back further than Gail’s blog. When she was an editor for “The Oil Drum” she edited and posted two of my articles on power satellites and one on StratoSolar.
The articles were works in progress and are all out of date. But the comments were interesting and even provoked discussion about them outside The Oil Drum.
The Kardashev scale concept is also linked with the prevailing back of the envelope guesstimate of that era (both in the West and East), for how long various fission materials could be available. Depending on the type of reaction and fuel it varies between few hundred years to almost 10k yrs easily..
Obviously, did not pan out, as people chickened out of essentially merit unrelated Three Mile, Chernobyl-Fukushima events, and perhaps more importantly “instant gratification” oil lobby taking over the long term planning scientist advisers to governments.
Every civilization in the galaxy is measured on the Kardashian scale based on how much per capita they spend on makeup, lingerie and bling.
I think you summarize the situation well. Thank you!
Also, with respect to your last question,”Must not the ultimate test for RE be how well they comply or fulfill this two «energetic laws»?”, this is what the calculations that researchers are trying to do, when they analyze “energy in versus energy out.”
What my post is saying is that an awfully lot of things have been left out of the researchers analyses, both in terms of the additional costs associated with of added transmission and added storage, to make the system work. Wind and solar can sort of work with the rest of the system, if they are given enough subsidies by the rest of the system. But the calculations that many people believe, that make it look like wind and solar are beneficial, really do not support the case that by themselves they provide true net energy to the system.
The lack of net energy from these devices would especially be the case, if most of the devices fail in the near term. Clearly, economic collapse could make the situation worse. Even, ending old feed-in tariffs could be a problem. I was reminded of this by a recent article called, Germany 2021: when fixed feed-in tariffs end, how will renewables fare?
The article is particularly pessimistic about rooftop solar. Without generous feed-in tariffs, old solar panels won’t make much economic sense. Wind will also be affected. Many wind turbines may be “repowered.” The issue with repowering, from articles I have read before, is that newer, bigger, more efficient wind turbines require different spacing and farther set-backs from homes, so they may not really be replaced.
In general, we are dealing with operators of all of these renewable devices who have many kinds of costs to cover. It the system does not give them adequate remuneration, they are likely to fail, just as any other business fails.
Very true.
What Europeans often call ‘social conquests’, using a moral and political narrative – female and working class emancipation, rights, middle-class ease for the many, etc – were in fact social changes based on an extraordinary energy surplus, now ending.
But, Xabier, before we had that “extraordinary energy surplus”, 90% of married women were homemakers, and the breadwinner could support a family of 5, 6 or 7. But with the energy surplus, over 70% of married women must work full time, and it takes two incomes to support a family of 3 or 4. Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
as we are all doomed to power cuts this seems a genius idea
https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/tosthult-rechargeable-led-bulb-00400418/
It does sound like a good idea, especially if the bulbs only cost 10 euros.
People in California especially need these!
The thing I couldn’t figure out from the website material was how much storage these batteries would really give. Would it be enough to handle a three day outage of electricity? Or a ten-minute outage? Or something in between?
2 hours of use at 1/2 lumens of when electricity is available, dimming after that. Requires 12 hours to charge with the light on. In the product description pull down.
Poor idea and implementation, IMO. You have to get to the bulb to access the switch …
There are much better and simpler ways to do this.
T2M
Use a dyno torch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanically_powered_flashlight
“A steeper decline in global economic growth still more likely than a synchronized recovery, even as multiple central banks dole out rounds of monetary easing, according to economists polled by Reuters in recent weeks.
“While a reprieve from escalating U.S.-China trade tensions has pushed stocks back near record highs, a record $17 trillion of bonds have negative yields and a key market signal of U.S. recession is still flashing red.
“After the European Central Bank cut its deposit rate further into negative territory and announced it would resume its asset purchases, the Bank of Japan… and the Federal Reserve are due to cut rates again as early as next week.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-global-economy-poll/deeper-global-slowdown-still-more-likely-despite-round-of-rate-cuts-idUKKBN1X400A
“Oil prices received a jolt mid-week on rumors that OPEC+ might cut deeper and also because of a surprise drawdown in EIA inventory data. Nevertheless, economic cracks continue to dominate the narrative…
“…the malaise is a global phenomenon.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Fears-Of-A-Global-Financial-Meltdown-Loom-Over-Oil-Markets.html
I am thinking that the fact that the US is beginning something similar to another round of QE might be raising oil prices. This would be the case if the US dollar floats lower relative to other currencies, making oil more affordable to them. This kind of effect would raise oil prices, perhaps more than cutting off supply. Cutting off supply tends to lead the economy toward “making a smaller batch,” I expect.
All of the price changes seem to be stimulated by the rumor. When the oil reduction in production actually gets implemented, then the price falls again.
Right – like the inverse of 2014/15!
Hopefully the Feds quasi-QE buys us some time and bolsters sentiment, as there is way too much talk of recession out there, to the point where it risks adding to our problems by becoming self-fulfilling.
Stronger demand in places like India and China would certainly be helpful.
“One of China’s largest energy companies [Sinopec], is facing a tough outlook. The slowdown in global economic growth in general and China, in particular, will hurt the performance of the company’s downstream business.
“The demand for oil products in the country is waning. The declining levels of vehicle sales could lead to a drop in diesel and gasoline consumption.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4298893-sinopec-economic-slowdown-hits-chinas-energy-giant
Cutting rates that are already negative doesn’t sound like a solution!
Not sure if you are interested in this, he seems to have a handle on the repo angle. Whatever is happening it is apparently in excess of 2009 if I am reading things correctly.
https://acting-man.com/?p=54827
I am starting to think things will hyperinflate but what does one do? Buy a combine? If you think a windmill is an intermittent device , consider a $500K machine only used once(well some double crop so twice) a year and then requires a good window of sun and not so darn much rain everything gets stuck. Dragging these machines through the mud is not good for them, some years back one was literally pulled apart in IA.
After the last few years, planting a wind turbine seems like a very sensible idea.
Dennis L.
Thanks! I think some of the combines are rented, rather than owned, so that more people get use of one during a season.
There is a new WSJ article up about the latest fire in California.
PG&E Power Lines Remain Risky to California, Even During Blackouts
While the official reason hasn’t been figured out yet, the suspicion lies with a transmission line that served a number of geothermal generating units. It hadn’t been turned off, but suddenly stopped functioning minutes before the latest fire started.
The long transmission wires required to any kind of renewable energy generation seem to be a big part of the wildfire problem.
There is a technical solution. Fast electronics can shut to the power off before a line falls on the ground. San Diego does that.
These “jumper” problems may take a different solution. Sounds like they failed due to the wind making them wiggle. It may be hard to detect that in time to shut the power off without causing sparks of hot metal.
One thing which might help would be a web camera looking down from all the towers in areas that can burn.
It’s a tough situation for people out here and there have been arguments and near fights at some fuel stations, as people with generator fuel containers try to jump the line of autos saying they just need a little. But also tough because it’s straining people’s ability to keep up with bills as at home businesses are disrupted or guys have to take time off from work to be there to run the generator and help the family as needed. Plus now there is pressure for everyone to get built in house generator systems that are 10-15 thousand bucks, once you get it all wired into a secondary fuse box with propane line leading to the generator. It’s either that or you have to run a portable generator so the food in the fridge doesn’t go bad or the Fridge gets mold growing in it, then sometimes people have to get a whole new fridge. That happened in the Valley Fire in 2015. Thousands of people getting new fridges which are 1000-2000 depending on the unit.
We’ve been contacted by PG&E our power will be turned off for several days beginning sometime on Saturday, tomorrow. That will be the 3rd such outage this year and the 2nd this month.
If you can’t handle having your power turned off for two or three days….you got problems. There are ways to get around it people just don’t want to and are lazy…lazy lazy…
That’s a really arrogant statement Denial.
Perhaps worded harshly, but not that extraordinary claim.
Who would be seriously endangered by 2-3day power outage?
Well, only people with A/ serious medical condition needing some sort of electricity powered support system say for breathing etc. or B/ people stuck in frivolous lifestyles (of their own making), e.g. living in hot hell hole needing giant a/c etc.
Otherwise cooking and light, water, is an easy fix for few days of outage.
As various natgas workarounds are available among other solutions.
Yes, for longer period and say winter time outage it’s serious and not easy/matter to solve. But doable with some planning/sacrifice of other frivolous expenses deemed necessary and earlier wrongly prioritized .
I agree with Chome Mags on this. It was an arrogant statement. On top of that it lacked empathy. It is not a question of “if you can’t handle having your power turned off…” It’s a question of how much extra bother you have to go through in order to handle it on top of all the usual hassle you have to face in coping with living in small-town and rural California.
It may not be life-threatening for most people to have to cope for three days without electricity, but at the very least it is very inconvenient, and it is costing people money and messing up the local economy in countless ways.
I hope these outrageous outages stop soon.
I lived a year without electricity or running water.
After a few months, it isn’t part of your reality.
In NorCal, it is more of an issue.
that last idea should be passed along to the CA power transmission companies. normally, i’m against Big Brother surveillance. that’s a good application.
“There is a technical solution.”
My associative memory seems to be in quote mood today. And it recalled this remark by H L Mencken, written in 1920: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
So whats my solution? Do not run high tension wires through acres of flammable material.
Or bury them and send DC current instead of AC.
” HVDC avoids the heavy currents required to charge and discharge the cable capacitance each cycle. For shorter distances, the higher cost of DC conversion equipment compared to an AC system may still be justified, due to other benefits of direct current links. HVDC currently uses voltages between 100 kV and 800 kV, with an 1,100 kV link in China due to become operational in 2019.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
Gail, intermittent renewables have problems I agree.
So if you want to make use of them, you really need a use where the intermittency isn’t a problem because the system has built-in storage, somewhere around a year.
Freshwater made by reverse osmosis would be one. We can store years of water underground using recharge wells. The energy cost for the water is around a kWh/ton. At 1.7 cents per kWh, less then 2 cents per ton, that seems like a reasonable use for intermittent power.
The other is synthetic oil. The infrastructure, ships, pipelines, and terminals to move 100 million bbls a day is in place and we can certainly use depleted oil fields to store product for a year. The cost (~$13 T over ten years) to pave over a big chunk of the Saraha with PV and build synthetic oil plants is not out of reach given the scale of energy projects.
I understand your objection that the governments would want to tax the synthetic oil, but why not have the governments own the PV and F/T plants and take all the revenue?
Technically it doesn’t look that hard. Besides we need a productive use for that zero-interest money.
Basically, the issue is that the energy return seems to need to be higher than it really is, in order for Saudi Arabia or some other country to get the energy benefit it needs, either from taxes or from direct ownership.
A big part of our problem today is diminishing returns on investments of all types. We need energy products that have a higher energy return than we are getting now to bring up the average. The renewables aren’t giving us a high enough return to keep the system going.
Yes, this could be illustrated on lot of examples as we did for NorthSea, Arctic, .., from another angle, lets take the Iranian South Pars gas field (largest in the world) will eventually eat $40-60-100B ? to develop fully all sections, while earning few $T, which would have to be shared – divided among various lesser contractors and investors as Iran under sanctions can’t do it alone both in capital and technology sense. And that’s “easy access” shallow shelf, favorable weather situation and all that. Obviously It’s quite good, but not ~1:50 gain or more type of thing anymore -on shore- fields provided previously..
“The renewables aren’t giving us a high enough return to keep the system going.”
That’s a technical/economic problem. You solve it with “design to cost,” or fail and look for another approach. For sure the cost (which is a measure of embedded energy) on PV and wind systems has come way down. There is a lengthy article in the current Science on wind systems which shows a cost reduction of about 12 fold since 1980. The article mentions that wind power (without subsidy) is down to about 4 cents/kWh.
And as I noted recently, PV is down to 1.7 cents per kWh.
Your concerns are certainly valid. I wonder how much less expensive energy would have to go for the economy to pick up?
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/apocalypse-near-pentagon-warns-climate-change-could-cause-us-military-collapse-within-20
Hmmm, I know nothing of CC other than what I read so no personal conclusions other than farming in the midwest is becoming a challenge secondary to weather. See the latest Millennial Farmer video regarding harvesting beans, he is probably about 100 miles from me. It doesn’t look like fun at all and what we are seeing is income on the ground that is tough to harvest and convert to cash. My guys were late into the field planting and got lucky with a window to get everything out before rain, and we have had rain since harvest. The growing season was short this year.
Yes, this is weather, not CC, but if there is no food does the terminology really matter?
Dennis L.
Thank you for the new read! ….Maybe we should go back to the days when a tree was felled and a joke bore through it to create a water pipe! Some still in existence today from centuries ago!
A lot less simplier in making than the PVC piping we have today👍
And drum roll….OUT OF CONTROL!
Opinion: The Federal Reserve is in stealth intervention mode
By Sven Henrich
Published: Oct 25, 2019 9:35 a.m.
What the central bank passes off as ‘funding issues’ could more accurately be described as liquidity injections to keep interest rates low
What’s the crisis, you ask? After all, we live in an age of trillion-dollar market-cap companies and unemployment at 50-year lows. Yet the Fed is acting like the doomsday clock has melted as a result of a nuclear attack.
Think I’m in hyperbole mode? Far from it.
Unless you think the biggest repurchase (repo) efforts ever — surpassing the 2008 financial-crisis actions — are hyperbole
And liquidity injections are massive and accelerating. On Tuesday, the Fed injected $99.9 billion in temporary liquidity into the financial system and $7.5 billion in permanent reserves as part of a program to buy $60 billion a month in Treasury bills. The $99.9 billion comes from $64.9 billion in overnight repurchase agreements and $35 billion in repo operations.
But market demand for overnight repo operations has far exceeded even the $75 billion the Fed has allocated, suggesting a lot more liquidity demand. Hence, on Wednesday the Fed suddenly announced a $45 billion increase on top of the $75 billion repo facility for a daily total of $120 billion. Here’s the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the branch involved in such actions
…..You don’t think the Fed is all about markets? Where have you been? After all, the Fed’s stated policy objective now is to extend the business cycle by any means necessary. And policy makers can’t do that with falling stock prices.
And so they are in accelerated daily intervention mode. Because that is what it takes. The questions that investors have to ask themselves is: What if it’s not enough? And what is it policy makers aren’t telling us? Why are they are forced into these historic, unexpected measures? What happens if they lose control? We may know more next week
Lots of charts in link…..
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-federal-reserve-is-in-stealth-intervention-mode-2019-10-25?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo
It’s certainly an eye catcher with those huge amounts being injected along with the schedule of injections. It would seem to be a big concern, but I’m not a finance guy, so I’d be interested to get Gail’s take on the situation.
Rising interest rates would certainly make stock markets around the world fall. Keeping stock markets up is hypothesized as the reason for all of the recent market interventions by the central banks.
I saw an article this morning about home fix-up investments perhaps falling in the future, but whether or not this happens, depending on the course of future interest rates. Home improvements are one of the things that are interest sensitive. Car sales are also interest sensitive. And of course, new building of any kind is interest sensitive. All of these things would be hurt if interest rates rise.
The charts in the linked article make it look a lot like the beginning of another round of QE. Also, the article talks about another interest rate cut next week. The interest rate cut and the new QE might make the US dollar fall lower relative to other currencies, and thus make commodities of all kinds less expensive outside the United States. It would help other countries stay away from recession, but commodity prices in the US would rise. This would help producers (such as oil from shale producers), but hurt consumers.
Maybe the changes are what it takes to keep things together a little longer. I don’t know.
“Rising interest rates would certainly make stock markets around the world fall. Keeping stock markets up is hypothesized as the reason for all of the recent market interventions by the central banks.”
and with all the interventions (stealth or not), we may see a severe 2020 recession where the stock markets don’t fall much at all…
I suppose the govs/banks think they have learned the lessons of 2008/2009 and will not allow markets to dive way lower…
but saving the markets likely will cause a leak or leaks to spring up in other area(s)…
or cause an economic dam to burst…
negative interest rates are a foreshadowing of a dam burst…
2020 will be a trip…
“2020 will be a trip…”
Possibly. I tend to pay attention to the longer-term where new technology may change a lot and not the short term events like recessions.
I also look for info/data that may give a clue to the longer-term…
I foresee recession years becoming the new normal in the 2020s and growth years becoming rare…
I foresee very little chance for any new tech to be a game changer, because from now on, year after year after gloomy year, the net (surplus) energy flowing through the world will be a little less and a little less and a little less…
the limit to growth has arrived or at least almost arrived…
this longer-term view has been around since about 1972, and from my seat in the balcony, the trend will be mostly downhill from here…
and being physics based, it is unstoppable by mere humans…
but hey everybody, have a nice day!
It is unstoppable; but we will cling to political, moral, and religious narratives that say otherwise rather than face reality. And pseudo-scientific ones.
Emotion will triumph over good sense.
Snake-oil sellers, like the quick Transition people, will proliferate,and the crowd will want to believe they have the cure.
If one does not understand the implications of the energy crisis, over-shoot, resource depletion, agricultural degradation, etc, many of their promises will seem highly plausible to the desperate.
Any growth phases in the 2020’s will likely be of the centrally-planned, ‘jobless or low-pay’ growth type we have seen recently, for the mass of people.
A few will still profit disproportionately s now: revolution is most unlikely.
GDP figures will mean nothing, being even more falsified and inflated than they are now.
David, yes, that’s the classic graph – I guess posted on Surplus, depicting several ever lower plateaus since 1970s as the growth flattened. Nowadays we are in the barely above zero segment, which will most likely flip into negative one during mid late 2020s.
That being said some sort of global block structure and attempted autarkies might extend quasi BAU even into mid 2030s for some parts of the world, but that’s about the upper limit.
Yes, there is much we still do not know. Google seems to be making progress on quantum computing, fusion may still work. Life will go on.
Dennis L.
Another black swan is AI. A substantial fraction of our problems is because we are not smart enough. AI might fix that.
Or AI might make them worse. We would think we know more than we do. Like giving the farmers in Africa an app so that they know which crops seem to have the best profit available. Of course, when all farmers change their planting in the same direction, the overproduction leads to precisely the opposite result.
“Or AI might make them worse. We would think we know more than we do. ”
That would be a really sad AI if it is no better than humans.
you’re assuming the next recession/depression is just another bump in the road. if it’s not recoverable, like a lot of the posts and commentary discuss here, then there will be no longer term for your new technology to operate. consider the title of this blog: Our Finite World, including especially fossil fuel-based energy that is expected and necessary for the continued civilization we all enjoy at the moment. long term, you might still be able to communicate with a few like-minded persons, perhaps by drawing figures in the dirt next to a blazing campfire featuring roasted rodents, or maybe upon a few scarps of paper that make it through without being used to start the next campfire. good luck.
It could be the end, and our descendants (if any) will be roasting rats.
But there are an awful lot of smart people working on the problems. There is an unknowable chance they might succeed.
And while the world (even the universe) is finite, there is a lot of room out there for really high tech humans. Have you ever thought of what people might do with nanotechnology?
Is the universe finite in time and size? I doubt it seriously. Zero division enabled cosmology is a pseudoscience.
http://www.quotehd.com/imagequotes/authors38/hannes-alfven-scientist-quote-we-have-to-learn-again-that-science.jpg
https://qt.azureedge.net/resources/quotes-images-large/there-is-no-rational-reason-to-doubt-that-the-universe-has-existed-indefinitely-12774fd9ce6bf4fda87cc0cf063de5ec.jpg
We have a whole lot of myths today that are based on models that someone believes to be true. People today are confident that the models are right. I am not convinced that they are; a lot of them are just today’s fairy tales, repeated enough times that many people believe that they must be true. In fact, our new myths have become a kind of religion. Our sins are against the planet; if we humans only behaved better, there would be no problem. All we have to do is stop eating and having offspring. Salvation comes from using cleverly named “renewables” and recycling. Greta understands this; why don’t the rest of us “get it?”
I agree with you that the universe might very well be infinite.
” Our sins are against the planet; if we humans only behaved better, there would be no problem. ”
Ah . . . the worst humans have ever done isn’t a patch on the mess when an asteroid ran into the earth some 65 million years ago. Assuming continuing advances, we are not that far from being able to prevent the next one.
“All we have to do is stop eating and having offspring”
The first will certainly prevent the second.
One of the things worth keeping in mind is that a pandemic could reduce the world population by half. That’s about what the Black Death did to Europe.
“The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population.[7] In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century.[8] It took 200 years for the world population to recover to its previous level.[9][10] The plague recurred as outbreaks in Europe until the 19th century.”
Can’t happen in this modern era you say? Consider African Swine Fever. As a result of it the Chinese hog population is down at least 40%.
An asteroid collision, due to physics, is not comparable with knowingly (though, admittedly, that knowledge was somewhat belated) trashing the planet. And there is no evidence that all it takes is “continuing advances” or that humans aren’t that far from being able to prevent a catastrophe. Humans can’t help doing what they are doing because they are just exhibiting innate behaviour, given the circumstances. There is no way humans will now stop clamouring for economic growth. Until, of course, the circumstances change in such a way that it becomes obvious that growth can’t continue.
Yes, some kind of virus may kill off a large number of humans but that won’t stop the destruction, only slow it.
Creation myths and concepts of original sin is very problematic, for a number of reasons.
1. Why create sinners and then torment them? Because being a heavenly psychopathic dictator is too much fun perhaps?
2. If there is a creation moment, what came before and why something instead of nothing? See 4.
3. What created the creator that created the creator. See 3. Belief in one singular creator: see 4.
4. If there is only one creator, then why can’t there be an universe without the creator and creation instant? Don’t agree: see 3.
5. What created the prerequisites for the creation of the prerequisites, for creating the creator or creation instant. See 5. Only one creator or creation instant? See 3.
If the universe is a spatiotemporal eternal process it solves problems #2-5,
#1 can be solved by rejecting a heavenly dictator and changing perspective on what is god.
https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/interdependence.jpg
Creation myths were created by people. They are ancient models of how people thought the world was formed. We really don’t know the universe was formed. The earth seems to have been formed about 4 billion years ago.
Not everyone believes in original sin, either.
If people are going to live together harmoniously, there need to be some rules for facilitating this. The rules in religious books represent codifications of rules that seemed to be helpful at that time. In order to encourage people to follow these rules, there needed to be punishment for rule breakers. Quite often in religions, these came after death. They stories made a believable way to encourage better behavior.
“original sin”
One of the best ideas ever. Little kids, babies even, obviously suffered and died before they were old enough to engage in anything sinful. Original sin allowed an all-powerful God to be a just God instead of a capricious one.
This is not a widely held view.
I am am skeptical that religions with gods offer anything else than hope and an heavenly continuation of the soul after death.
The Ten Commandments is written down from what is already innate in humans.
A “just” heavenly psychopath. Well, okay. 😉
Or maybe, many different religions have insights into the nature of the god. Each religion codifies insights suitable for a particular group, at a particular point in time.
Indeed, and now it is about time to become cosmic in our understanding of ourselves and nature. The “monkey do” brutalism and reprehensible dominance schemes has to go the way of the dodo.
http://www.sherinshe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/einsteins_cosmic_religion.jpg
Three paths. One is truth.
We cover half the planet with pvs that we dont have the energy left to create let alone batteries. EROI of under 2 doesnt matter. We use these Pvs to create synthetic oil using the earths water as a building block and continue to feed our species with synthetic fertilizer made from synthetic for food production. Industrial civilization continue without limit. Our intelligence reigns supreme conquering the physical limits.
We hit the wall. Population decreases by 7 billion. Natural processes that store the suns energy that were utilized to support agriculture throughout history are returned to. by the surviving population. We acknowledge limits and are grateful to the planet and god for what it provides.
Extinction.
Life is pretty resilient plus we have no idea what tomorrow brings, that’s just human hubris. But yes there are an awful lot of processes heading in the wrong direction. But that doesn’t mean extinction, just slowly worsening conditions for an increasing number of humans.
So enjoy today, tomorrow might be worse!
Umm, yes, much worse. https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/implications-of-climate-change-for-us-army_army-war-college_2019.pdf
In the last 150 years we have replaced our traditional methods by more productive oil driven methods. The dependency on fossile fuels in the developed countries is very high. Actually it is a sign of being developed. Changes in energy use are always possible. The big question is on what cost it comes. And the main question keeps if our economy could handle a major transition to solar and wind.
One little example. If a hole is needed in the wall, eg to hang a cupboard, our ancients used a chisel to open it and used some filler to close it. Instead of this convincing method needing chisels that will be usable for at least 150 years in our minds it works like this:
a) Wind wheel with generator
b) Energy buffer eating 30%
c) Transmission lines (eating 30% of the left-over 70%)
d) Battery driven drill (that eats up 30% of the 70% of 70% – not to forget the battery stored energy that will never be used) and that has to be renewed after three years, due to planned obsolescence.
All this for the convenience of drilling holes without sweating and having less dust in the house and some higher precision? This is so much work it is unlikely this technology could keep up. If it does not though it will have an effect on economy.
In the moment energy use will come with higher costs (energy price or CO2-certificate or more difficult to obtain or less income of the masses) the consumers will think their methods over and find more adequate solution.This will have hardly to calculate risks for economy.
It means transition comes with a price we might possibly not be able to pay.
It sounds like you are talking about using a drill with a rechargeable battery to drill an occasional little hole, instead of using a simple hand-held tool.
I agree that this switch to higher complexity borders on silliness. The cost per hole becomes ridiculous, when a person factors in all of the pieces of the system.
I think that a lot of the ownership of these drills is driven by status-seeking. I need to look as good or better than my neighbors, so I have to have one as well. For what it is worth, my husband and I don’t have one, I don’t think, unless someone gave us one as a Christmas present, and we forgot about it.
It seems like a lot of unnecessary items get pushed along as gifts a person can buy for someone else. They look like something that might be marginally useful. Since the person already has everything he needs, why not give him the latest technology?
Gail,
I build and have a built a great deal of my own housing over the years, tools are good capital investments, drills last a long time, dragging cords is a pain, the time saved with batteries is great and modern tools are even better. Off the top of my head guess, my tools have made me $100K+ net after tax, legally by multiplying what I would have been limited to without them. Add to the mortgage interest avoided as things can be added over time as finances permit. Even better than a drill is a cordless impact driver, makes fast, accurate work of placing screws the quality and design of which has also increased greatly.
If one wants to live without tools, look at the “lodges” of plains Indians. My guess is the squaws and children worked pretty hard to get the material(leather maybe) for the tepee tanned, and all the animal meat/fat removed. Sounds like really great hand work to me, I think I read somewhere that animal brains are used to prepare the hides.
There is a perverse celebration in some circles of going back to more primitive methods, I suspect that is mostly from those whose idea of fixing something is calling some else to do the job. All this self reliance stuff has some pretty considerable time constraints.
Dennis L.
I am sure that power drills make sense when doing a lot of work that requires a drill. We are basically homeowners who hire someone to help us with anything that is more complex than changing a light bulb.
All very true. Modern tools save immense amounts of time. Some of us will just want to get the job done, as quickly as possible, while others take pleasure in holding a tool the right way, in the tool itself, and doing a bit of thinking about other stuff while on the job, etc. Two entirely different, legitimate, approaches.
Right there with you on use of tools, Dennis. I have my gen. contractors lic. and have lots of tools and a workshop in the lower part of the house I remodeled. I’d feel really out of place without a workshop.
I made an ornate chair for a Sculptor on a project for a Laotian community by just using pre-painted MDF, a router table, handheld routers and shaped various parts with belt & box sanders, and some by hand to finish it off. The Sculptor then put clay relief on parts of the chair and a Laotian woman in full religious garb sitting in the chair. Then I made the molds for all of it and worked with a bronze foundry to get it made into bronze. It will be in the center of a large building in the middle of a community they are building. The key to a chair is whatever you do to one side, immediately to the same to the other side to make sure it matches.
Also, I just finished a custom display case, done in 3 parts, that I had roto-cast resin molds made for it and castings of the pieces as needed, so I can spend less time doing woodwork and more time in the spray room and assembling them to display my extensive graded card collection, sports and non-sports.
Tools definitely help save a lot of money and what a great sense of achievement when making things from scratch or fixing or building things around the house. Got a box for electrical, a box for plumbing, the vehicles, tools, tools, tools. Nothing like them and the skills to know how to use them.
Right on!
Dennis L.
the new cordless power drills also have high-intensity LED lights on them to illuminate the area being drilled. i guess you could turn them off and use a candle, like the ancients. my father used hand tools, and i inherited some of them. those are going to be the rare ones, as they mostly aren’t made anymore.
no sure your analogy holds up. we can always revert to the hammer and chisel, with back-fill by putty. we probably will have to, once all the high-tech stuff disappears. it’s less efficient, time consuming, and not everyone will be skilled in the procedure. looks like high-powered lasers might be next for precision hole making, assuming the grid holds up and they can figure a safe way for consumers to use them.
Lights in our drills, and lights in our shoes: must be The Future (TM).
I use a hammer and screwdriver no less than 90 years old sometimes: belonged to my grandfather, beautifully-shaped handles worn by age,and the metal itself has aged wonderfully. I have a few bookbinding tools 200 yrs old, and press and bell-hammer 100 yrs old.
Having said that, the big US-made hammer I bought a few years ago is a gem: very well balanced, lovely hickory handle – no nasty rubber grip-stuff!
we had some appraisers drop by that were using handheld laser range finders for measurements. over long distances, they made a lot of sense. otherwise, i thought of them as high-tech overkill next to my trusty 30-foot retractable tape measure, with locking brake. i think they made a 3-D model of the house.
A good example of fun – a pretty 3-D rotating model of your house – but entirely unnecessary complexity.
The 2 areas that pro-renewable energy people conveniently never mention:
1. The annualized output of a wind or solar farm is a third of the nameplate capacity of the farm. For instance a solar farm would have to be 5 square miles in size to replace a nuclear power plant.
2. It’s never mentioned that the renewable energy is only a portion of electricity. In the US the share of total energy that electricity contributes is about 40%. So to say renewables contributes 20% of energy means just of electricity.
2 major half-truths as far as I’m concerned.
We see an awfully lot of reports that say, “Newly added wind and solar generation is (some high percentage) of total electricity generation added.”
You are definitely right that the people who are making those statements are counting on readers or listeners to miss the fact that nameplate capacity is a lot more than the actual generated electricity. Also that renewable electricity is only a small part of total electricity.
I think that readers also miss the fact that wind and solar have fairly low life expectancies, compared to fossil fuel and nuclear generating plants. The latter are constructed to last more than 50 years. Wind turbines, with all of their moving parts, seem to age particularly quickly. This article mentions that MidAmerican Energy is repowering wind turbines constructed since 2014, which is 14 years after they were constructed.
The shorter design life of wind, especially, leads to a treadmill of needing to add more and more generating capacity.
Solar power is more uncertain, partly because it has not been installed long enough to get good data on how well it works, as installed, in practice. The solar PV material itself seems to be have a quite long life, at least 30 years, by some estimates. The problems are more indirect. This article says,
There is also the potential for causing fires, especially if the modules are not up to standards or are installed badly, as the Walmart experience shows.
Wind turbines:
I once owned stock in that company, nice dividend, good company; a fellow from Nebraska thought so as well so he bought the entire utility and gave the shareholders cash – nice. Now, Warren does not invest to lose money, if he is investing in wind, it makes money; taking the opposite side of the trade with this guy, e.g. going short wind energy might not be one of the better retirement ideas. If the turbine made real money over its life time including depreciation, it was a good investment. Warren has owned that company since maybe the early 90’s, before wind power, he invested in wind power, he is investing more, improving his investment. He knows how to take a loss and hand part of it to us, i.e, taxpayers, he is investing more not divesting.
Data farms seem to be locating to Iowa to take advantage of this cheap electricity. Gee, one could use cheap electricity to mine bit coins and literally “make” money. Sounds like a great business plan.
Things are a challenge, but some things do work.
As for the solar panels causing fires, Christmas lights have a potential for causing fires, eventually things get better, not everything doesn’t work.
Dennis L.
Warren “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” Buffet? Or another Warren?
I believe that tax credits have historically reduced costs by about 2/3.
I am not an expert and don’t play one on TV.
The tax credits appear to be production tax credits of $.023/KwH for first ten years. ewea.org states that an average turbine can produce 6millliion Kwh per year so tax reduction is $138K/year or assuming a 50% bracket maybe $256K gross income.Wholesale selling rates appear to be $.13/Kwh in IA. Cost for the turbine appears to be a few millions, depending.
https://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480
My eyes glaze over but the Newsweek article points out CA being very aggressive in wind power; apparently another 2-3 million CA residents are about to lose electricity so Gail is probably right again in that wind/renewable are not very reliable but not for the principal reasons thought, it is the transmission issue.
So is this the black swan event? The economic losses cannot be regained as they are related to time lost. CA is the nation’s largest economy. The state is faced on a first order approximation of let it run and burn it down, turn it off and shut it down. Bummer.
Dennis L.
” it is the transmission issue.”
Technical problem. Fly the transmission lines with thermal imaging cameras and fix hot jumpers. Or add parallel jumpers so one opening will not make sparks.
For the worse spots, clean out the vegetation and make the ground fireproof under the towers. Or do control burns on the bad places. Places, where they do control burns (Arizona), have fewer problems with fires
That’s going to take legislation to protect the burning agency from liability.
Wholesale electricity in IA I am sure are a lot less than $ .13 per kWh. When I look up EIA data, residential electricity prices in IA are a bit under $ .13 per kWh. Industrial prices are in the $.06 per kWh range. Wholesale electricity prices need to be less than industrial prices.
This is a chart of wholesale electricity prices in the US Northeast. (This does not include IA, however.)
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/bloomberg-pjm-fair-value-price-for-electric-power.png
The chart shows recent wholesale electricity prices below $ .03 per kWh. The scale does not go above the equivalent of $.045 per kWh. These prices are not for intermittent electricity; the are for electricity whose timing can be controlled. Getting wind power, with necessary battery or other backup, below this level, is a challenge. The way the challenge has been overcome is with lots of subsidies.
I found the Warren quote, or at least one version of it. It is by Alice Friedemann in a 2015 post, 900 Tons of material to build just 1 windmill.
She says,
She references a US News and Reports Article by Nancy Pfotenhauer which says,
Gail,
There seem to be a great many well intentioned people in the world whose main skill is to write policy and become part of government one way or the other to the extent that perhaps 1/6 of the US population works for the government. If the laws are written, one follows them. Whatever people may say about the wealthy, over the last few years the BN has done an incredible maintenance program that is visible from the bridges and roads along the facilities as well as the locomotives being washed regularly. Money is being put into infrastructure, repairs are being made. Berkshire owns both BN and the utility, BN is from the outside well maintained, one expects the same with MidAmerican. In a society some things don’t make sense, inorder to get that done which does make sense some times as Ann Margret said in “Grumpy old Men” the shortest path is the long way around or something similar.
Most likely few utility people want the headache of balancing the ups and downs of intermittent electricity but someone wrote a law, perhaps provided incentives because they thought it would work one day and here we are. It is not ideal, but the lights go on. Nancy Pfotenhauer is the president of MediaSpeak Strategies. She is attractive, knows the ropes in DC and most likely has never been in an electrical generating station in her life. Were she to go away, few would miss her, but another non technical type would be available to step up to the plate, write some new policy and spend countless paid hours before a committee somewhere debating all the details from models that support the details.
MN has state requirements for renewable energy, run a coop and somewhere you need to purchase renewable electricity to provide the real stuff, fail to do it and I assume the utility is fined or some such thing. It is simply the law. If there are state incentives, they cost the tax payers money which saves the coop utility money; a dollar doesn’t know where it goes and there is always someone who can shave a few cents off of said dollar as it goes on its way.
There much to learn and understand and none of us can do it alone, somehow there needs to be a group; one trick is to join a good group that avoids models which don’t work and thus heads down blind alleys, so far this group seems to have some sound ideas, some might even be useful.
Dennis L.
The Green Party in Britain thought that eco-houses should only last 20 yrs – then you can build new ones with more advanced and Greener technology!
No doubt that made them quite happy with short-life solar panels, etc.
Not very bright, really.
I don’t know anyone who’s used solar power off-the-grid, & un-subsidized, as much as I have.
This tablet is powered from a deep-cycle battery which was charged yesterday from a solar panel.
I get maybe a few $/year worth of grid power from the system, & have repeatedly, over the years, replaced the degraded batteries (about $100 each), & even even replaced the inverter (about $40).
Such experience gives some Idea of how feeble & costly solar power actually is, & how dependent it is on the fossil-fuel-based infrastructure (is there any AC power grid in the world which gets even nearly half its energy from IRE [intermittent renewable energy — wind, solar, etc.]?).
Here are more results of our techno-state-ist system, from the “Graveyard of Empires”:
“Life in the most drone-bombed country in the world
“America’s longest war has turned Afghanistan into an unwilling testing ground for warfare technology.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614499/afghanistan-warefare-technology-testing/?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement
I would point out, too, that people like you who have tested how solar works in practice have quite a few benefits:
1. Most of them live in relatively mild climates, where extreme heat in summer is not a problem. If extreme cold is a problem, they often heat their home with a fossil fuel, such as propane.
2. Vehicles, except for possibly a small personal vehicle, were not powered by electricity from the solar panels. I would guess that you did not even have a personal electric vehicle powered by your solar panels.
3. As you point out, all of the stuff you buy and use, come from the fossil fuel economy.
4. The electricity system has enough consumers, in total, that it can give you a low price for the few hours of grid electricity you use. If the electricity system had to be set up, just to provide backup power, its cost per hour would be many times higher, because of the many fixed costs (such as maintaining transmission lines).
“1. Most of them live in relatively mild climates, where extreme heat in summer is not a problem. If extreme cold is a problem, they often heat their home with a fossil fuel, such as propane.”
I’m in Fremont, CA (“Silicon Valley”), & have no powered heating or cooling in this truck, except when I drive it locally, on weekends.
“2. Vehicles, except for possibly a small personal vehicle, were not powered by electricity from the solar panels. I would guess that you did not even have a personal electric vehicle powered by your solar panels.”
I run the engine when I drive — when the ignition is on, a solenoid connects the deep-cycle battery to the alternator, so that it charges both batteries, & then disconnects when the key is off, so that nothing is taken off the main battery when I’m using the tablet, so I can still crank the engine, after 5 days — I take the 30-watt solar panel down, before I drive (it’s not easy, doing without grid power — & it doesn’t give you transport power — I use LED flashlights, at night).
Saudi Arabia has now also become an unwilling testing ground. Dead serious. That’s why I looked how much oil reserves/production there is outside the Middle East.
The so-called proved oil reserves in the BP Statistical Review, which
are widely quoted by the media, are NOT all proven.
The average proved reserve life in Russia, the US, Canada, China,
Kazachstan, Brazil and the North Sea is just 11 years
The proved and probable R/P value is only 17 years for the above group.
Contingent resources may be non-commercial depending on oil prices.
24/10/2019
Uncertainties following the Abqaiq attack have shrunk the world’s safe
oil reserves by around half (part 2)
http://crudeoilpeak.info/uncertainties-following-the-abqaiq-attack-have-shrunk-the-worlds-safe-oil-reserves-by-around-half-part-2
This and part 1 are basically an update to earlier work.
Gail did the following post in the oildrum, using a graph of mine
The Disconnect Between Oil Reserves and Production
March 2008
http://theoildrum.com/node/3664
Their water maps are here with lake levels, rainfall and flows
https://www.hydro.com.au/watermap/
How do we measure energy security?
In a typical year Tasmania’s energy generation mix is roughly:
Hydropower generation 70% (about 8200 GWh)
Wind generation 10% (about 1000 GWh)
Gas generation 8% (about 900 GWh)
Basslink imports from mainland 12% (about 1400 GWh)
https://www.hydro.com.au/clean-energy/secure-energy
Will pumped hydro unlock the transition to renewables?
https://arena.gov.au/blog/will-pumped-hydro-unlock-the-transition-to-renewables/
We have very little choice. We are in WW3 against nature.In a war, you don’t look for $$$ you look for survival. Farmland in Australia is now turning into a desert, but the government still continues with coal (6% of global production) which will come back as a boomerang.
One thing that varies greatly from place to place is the amount hydroelectric varies from year to year. This is a chart I made a while ago for California.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/california-annual-hydroelectric-production.png
Note that this chart is zero-based. Electricity generation varies all over, from year to year. Dry areas of the world especially have this problem, but it is a problem elsewhere as well.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/electricity-generated-by-hydroelectric-europe.png
It becomes very difficult to depend on hydroelectric for more than a small percentage of its maximum output. Month to month variability is an issue as well.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/washington-state-hydroelectric-generation-by-month.png
A lot of fossil fuel backup is usually needed.
Interesting Germany such a laggard in big Hydro (lack of good sites?), perhaps they did not repair the allied bombed out ones.. and went for other energy projects after the war instead.
80% of German hydropower generation comes from just 2 states, Bavaria and Baden Wuerttemberg. This is due to topography.
https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany
The better sites in the Alps are in Austria, Switzerland and France
https://electroverse.net/professor-valentina-zharkova-breaks-her-silence-and-confirms-super-grand-solar-minimum/
“Misleading Indications”
this is what I think is going on with CBs and economists…
these are intelligent people, and in their domain Substitutability has always worked and will always work…
so what I figure they are thinking is that Renewables should work fine as a substitute for FF…
somehow they have gotten the “Indication” that Renewables will work just fine…
what they are missing is that Renewables are far inferior to FF in providing net (surplus) energy, so they don’t understand how inadequate Rs are for powering the world in the near future…
it’s like that link posted just before the cutoff to the previous article which I missed replying to:
https://www.kitco.com/news/2019-10-21/Negative-rates-forever-Central-bankers-look-for-an-exit.html
“Negative interest rates may be hiding “deep underlying problems,” said Ásgeir Jónsson, governor of the Central Bank of Iceland. They’re a “sign of sickness for developed economies.”
no kidding, buddy!
there’s no Substitutability for FF, and the “sickness” is basically the end of net energy growth in the world…
In terms of CB/economists it’s important to make distinction between their “low ranking” PR/media figures (95% of info circulating in the public and media time exposure), and the upper echelons of handlers and even the top layer of partners-owners of the system.
Not surprisingly, at crucial junction of policy change the upper layers guys go directly into the msm channels, hence for example the recent doom warnings by the previous chief of BoE, baron Mervyn King.
The idea the upper echelons don’t have some sort of “OFW/Surplus” leaning analysis available to them as well is preposterous. The oil wars of 2001 onwards were reaction to early peak scenarios which understated the later ~2.5x achieved extraordinary recovery factor by advanced technologies (and printed money) applied to mature oil / natgas fields.
Simply, renewables build up was a chosen scenario (out of many / not brave-bold enough to campaign for NPPs) how to placate the public, utilize the prospect of decent amount of natgas believed to be available into mid term future with local sources of wind and sun – inside a global situation of threat of incoming triage and various energy related wars etc.
In short: buying time, bridge to somewhere..
Good summary.
And also, while tottering along on the natural gas/fake ‘renewables’ bridge, fighting off rising calls for Redistribution of wealth – their greatest short-term fear, hence the demonisation of ‘entitlement’ and the expensive Boomers – and also dealing with the demographic challenge: hence their synchronised, otherwise senseless, sponsorship of mass migration from Africa and Asia into the core economies to maintain demand at the expense of social stability (which they believe won’t touch them in their mansions and estates).
All pretty clear. They know, but do they know enough? I fear that events, mass discontent, and the profound consequences of the energy crisis will, as so often with elites historically, outstrip their planning capacity.
Promising the great Green Clean Transition and hectoring increasingly stressed and impoverished people about the need to ‘re-train and don’t complain’ (Macron is the star here), will hardly be sufficient.
For the humble individual, all a question of the exact timing of these global processes, and specific location, as to just how bad it gets.
My own bet is on a semi-rural location, so as to avoid town riots, but near to an important hub, preferably not a mega-city, without any real race problems. And still beautiful enough to relieve the stress of events. I’d hate to face this just staring at concrete…..
Macron is the authentic mouth-piece and servant of these people: the habitual arrogance, indifference to poverty, telling people not to complain, that they have in fact ‘nothing to complain about’, empty promises of national renewal and consultation, combined with very hard repression of protests which show us what is to come….
His recent turn towards better relations with Russia is very significant at this juncture.
Xabier, I have made that bet. I live on the Mediterranean island of Gozo, in a small, friendly village, an 8 minute bus ride from the small and compact capital city (Victoria), and when I need it, which is not very often, a ferry to the main island.
Malta is a deeply Christian country, and based on long and very bitter experience they will fight to the last man against the Moslem invasion that is wrecking much of Western Europe. They also live a mostly old fashioned lifestyle, which I greatly respect. Was I right? Time is the mother of Truth.
(No, that is not my religion, but as my own holy book says, “I have not denied God in any of his manifestations”.)
If I look up Gozo, it has a mild climate and a population of about 37,000. This population is divided among a number of small towns. A person gets to the island by ferry. It seems to be a popular vacation site. There are cars and bus service on the island.
Gozo also has two splendid baroque style opera houses. This month performing La Traviata and Aida. An admirable feat, when you consider that the entire continent of Australia has just one, and that one with the worst acoustics in the world!
Yes, even their insider knowledge (plus wrong decision taken at the important junctions) won’t save them in the end. As for Macron, these upper layer actors for hire are worst of the lot, not smart-bold enough to be independently wealthy pirates themselves but brave enough to strangulate the little and tiny guys down there with passion.
ps as I’m writing it, accidentally witnessed through window interested scene as one brave little climbing squirrel on a bush fought for territory against two way larger birds (each from one side – airborn ambush lol) and won, what a competitive world..
You are most correct, choosing the proverbial last stand is important, not as much as in any tactical way, but as you nicely put not having to stare at concrete that very last second when it is all around going downhill and swarms of unfortunates are encircling..
Somewhat related perhaps. It’s all coming from OFW comments, but I nown lean strongly to the aesthetic determinism hitherto merely hinted at. I would bet on economic activity that looks like this, rather than any other kind. I also think that the tiniest amount of technology (appropriate or otherwise) could smooth out the rough edges of this lifestyle considerably. : https://search.aol.com/aol/image?p=arican+women+carrying+hesd+loads&s_it=img-ans&v_t=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&fr=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthumbs.dreamstime.com%2Fz%2Fafrican-woman-carrying-heavy-load-bor-south-sudan-february-unidentified-south-sudanese-carries-wood-her-head-43639096.jpg#id=30&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Foyinboafricanabeni.files.wordpress.com%2F2013%2F03%2Fcarrying.jpg&action=click
If this link doesn’t work I’ll look for another soon.
Sorry, Artleads: that link leads to a site owned by Verizon Media, who allow you to access it only if you first surrender all your privacy. No way. There are reasons I keep caches disabled and cookies blocked, and I consider them good reasons.
+++++++
Didn’t know. My apologies to all.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/the-art-and-science-of-carrying-things-on-your-head.html
There’s much better imagery–where the load carried by a single (mostly) woman has an agreeable balance between the human and the load. The arrangement itself has poise. Hard to find the right images, but will keep the prospect in mind.
Energy in fossil fuels was concentrated, and stored by nature. In case of wind, and solar, it is us, who have to concentrate, and store it. This is the difference that cannot be overcome, and makes solar and wind many times worse, than fossil fuels.
Nail on the head. Refined petroleum products are really quite unique high density energy molecules that allow somewhat safe until point of use. We take for granted a energy source that has a tremendously high energy density that can be stored and used at will. Any human created alternative to this molecule package has big problems with not being energy dense enough, extremely toxic ,unsafe, requiring unobtainable amounts of energy to use via infrastructure or some combo of the above. While i consider certain posters contributions about synthetic fuel from PV unrealistic in the extreme at least it acknowledges that a better package for energy that is still usable and safe does not exist.
I like and use PVs. Without batteries they are not really useful. Batteries as a energy storage device have limitations determined by physics. They can not compete with a readily available natural resource molecule that has high density potential energy. They are only a extension of the power of fossil fuels. They will not sustain industrial civilization. That they are being promoted as such shows the arrogance of our species that will be our legacy.
A very good comment. The only alternative I think might be feasible is ethanol, which has a reasonable energy density, is not toxic (I hope not: there’s some of it in a brandy glass alongside my mousepad right now), and can be produced in a reasonably sustainable manner, but not please from plants, use microorganisms.
Fill the Caspian Sea with tiny critters, add tons of sugar, and let Nature and sunlight do the rest.
This is an excellent point. Even hydroelectric (which is powered by gravity transporting power) has much more concentration than wind and solar.
Yes, but wind tends to be installed in “wind alleys” like NorthSea and other shelf or onshore plateaus with prevailing strong wind patterns, so it is essentially already concentrated stream of energy, somewhat. Same effect exist (very rarely) in urban setting as well, where is wind tunneled into stream through apartment blocks and hills/canyons etc.. very good even for cheap small scale setup (but suitable perhaps for 1% of pop only living in such special areas).
Wind does seem to better match our energy needs than solar. Some places it may work passably well, if it is used with fossil fuels to back it up, and a way can be found to keep the price high enough for backup producers.
Small wind turbines don’t work at all. This is an article from 2010, but the physics hasn’t changed.
Real-world tests of small wind turbines in Netherlands and the UK
If they worked, you would see lots of them.
Thanks for the link, I vaguely remember it from the PO years..
It’s ~decade old test, some of the manufs no longer exist, the industry moved forward in terms of specs, prices, technologies. They also specify the intent of such test for hopefully powering entire .nl typical household on electricity, and they are using general low yield mast/location..
So, in essence everything I was NOT talking about.
Again, I clearly stated that in these SPECIAL urban location of pre existing wind concentrating tunnel effect – wind works beautifully. Why is it not mass adopted, well again I said perhaps only ~1% of such sites exist.. so who would bother, they rather slap PVs or heat pump etc..
Besides, the test aim is a joke, as practitioners well know, in general (non urban included) the advantage of “small wind” is opportunity charging bank of batteries and or resistance heating of tap or floor heating water tanks.. 24/365
Thank you: an excellent analysis. My own calculations gave the same answer: the typical wind turbine, over its useful like, is an energy sunk, and not even counting the (unknown) cost of decommissioning.
Small wind turbines must have been designed by a idiot: basic physics tells you the energy generated is approximately as the square of the blades’ radius. Which is why mediaeval windmills were big. They could also feather properly, and so worked at almost any non zero wind speed.
I understand that families sometimes lived inside them and were part time farmers. They regulated how much pumping the windmills could generate by adding and removing cloths over the mesh blades. They communicated with other families using flag signals, so as to coordinate efforts.
There has been way too much “wishful thinking” in pronouncements.
Whether or not the climate is changing, our ability to change the situation through a transition to intermittent renewables is effectively zero. This is the point that the IEA and politicians have not understood.
I hate this implied questioning of the science. “Whether or not” implies that there is doubt that the climate is changing. This is not the case, even the few contrary climate scientists who remain don’t doubt that the climate is changing due to human behaviour (though they may doubt the severity of that change). So you should not be writing “whether or not the climate is changing’, rather, “regardless of the fact that the climate is changing”.
Ok. I agree that the weather is changing. But I seriously doubt that humans can do anything to change the situation, apart from participating in the collapse that seems to be baked into the cake in the fairly near future.
A silly story has been passed around that says we can transition to renewables and that will fix the situation. I don’t think it is really the case. At best, trials can be made in local areas regarding whether some wind and solar can be added, without too detrimental an effect on the overall system. Their output will likely not last beyond the collapse, however. The complexity (international trade, extreme specialization, big businesses, lots of debt) required for modern renewables cannot hold together long enough.
Another silly story has been passed around saying that the world economy can grow forever, and that CO2 levels will rise to outrageous levels. It is untrue because we are already up against resource limits that will lead to near-term collapse. It is unlikely that very many humans will be around to see what happens after the collapse. The few people that are left can move to parts of the world that are more suitable for humans. Alaska, with all its coal, may be the new garden spot. Without coal, humans tend to deforest the land.
It’s climate that is changing, not weather, though both are connected, of course. Humans could alter the situation but only if their behaviour changed. This can’t happen, since we are a species with a characteristic behaviour, given a set of circumstances. Eventually, that characteristic behaviour will change because environmental degradation, of all kinds, will cause a change of circumstances in which humans act. By then it will be too late to save much, if any, of the lives we’d heretofore lived.
I agree with many of your other points, Gail. However, I doubt anyone can give a reasonable argument for what the remaining humans will do or where they will go. When the world is utterly changed, as it must eventually be, what the remaining humans will be able to do is unknown. It would be sad to think that they would still cling to the idea of burning fossil fuels.
High levels of complexity just don’t work. That is the problem.
“High levels of complexity ”
It’s hard to imagine something more complicated than smartphones. the internet, or quantum computers. But I see your point. It takes at least a billion-person market for a semiconductor fab plant to make sense.
Yes, it’s the climate that’s irreversibly changing. Apocalyptic scenes in Australia
BOM issues dangerous wind warning as dust blankets drought-ravaged towns
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-26/bom-warns-of-high-winds-and-dust-storms-across-nsw/11642590
Yes, but is there anything that we humans can actually do to reverse or improve the situation? I really doubt it. Not in the direction of wind and solar.
Humans have been trying to influence weather (probably not climate) without success for a very long time: Rain dances, Worshipping Thor. We now know how to seed clouds, so we do have a way of influencing weather.
But we really cannot do much to fix our climate problem. Our biggest problem is “Too many people” and we cannot fix that one. The population problem in developed countries mostly looks like an immigration problem, because the big population growth is in Africa and Asia.
As I see it, building wind turbines and solar panels is mostly an excuse to use more coal now, to build devices that, as a practical matter, will have very short lifespans. The big push behind building them is the belief that they can give us usable electricity in the future. Unfortunately, they cannot outlast the fossil fuel system. In fact, they may bring the electricity transmission system sooner than it would otherwise fail, by their need for fossil fuels to subsidize their operation. In the US, we are discovering that their long distance transmission lines lead to a lot of wild fires, too. The latest fire in California seems to involve long distance transmission from a geothermal plant.
There is also a big push for wind and solar from people who want to make money off of them.
Another type of push for solar is from wealthy individuals who believe that they personally will be saved, if they have solar panels on top of their homes. If they can get poor people to subsidize the purchase of these solar panels, isn’t this just a way of helping the rich, at the expense of the poor? Adding electric cars for the rich, subsidized by the poor, is another way to increase the disparity between the rich and the poor.
I think that adding wind and solar is pointless, except perhaps in a few situations where the economics makes sense, without a lot of subsidies.
The climate is indeed changing. If people want to fix the situation, they need to put their efforts elsewhere. Perhaps they could work on birth control for Africa. Or, convincing people to eat less meat.
“cannot do much to fix our climate problem”
In practical terms, you are probably right. But it is not impossible, Google for Dyson Dots Kennedy. Such sunshades could put the Earth into an ice age. (And recent research makes it looks like the very first ice age was caused by an asteroid smashup shading the Earth.)
I freely admit that deploying 200 million tons of steel shades in the Earth-Sun L1 position is more ambitious than power satellites.
” work on birth control for Africa.”
That’s one of the things we might get from AI.
“Or, convincing people to eat less meat.”
Why is the taste of a rare steak so rewarding? If you think about it, the only way is that in times long gone by humans who had such a taste were more likely to reproduce and pass on the liking for meat. A taste for meat that is wired into the genes is going to take considerable convincing to counter.
Humans can’t reverse or “fix” climate change. We’ve already added too much CO2 for that. However, we could, hypothetically, slow and limit that change. You’re right that renewables won’t influence the situation much. They haven’t so far and the growth appeared to stall last year. The concentration of CO2 has been rising, regardless. So it’s clear that world governments are more fixated on economic growth than on bequeathing a habitable planet to future generations.
The “too many people” problem is not specifically related to the climate crisis though it is related to multiple environmental problems as we continue to expand our footprint and push other species out. So we won’t solve the climate crisis by birth control.
Although we should try to lessen the footprint of our global civilisation (as slowing environmental degradation does give us more time to figure out a way forward), it’s impossible to for humans to significantly alter their collective species behaviour. Consequently, catastrophe is bound to overtake us all eventually, though the timescales are uncertain.
We have been over this; complexity is not the problem. The complexity of the biosphere on earth is staggering. Nothing mankind ever have and will produce ever comes close.
However, mankind has a knack for dominance hierarchies which leads to non-robust complications, sprinkled with single points of failure, such as the FF industry and finance institutions. It is not complex at all, just obscure and complicated.
Can we please stop using words such as “complex” without understanding them in their proper context?
You are right. Dominance hierarchies are big part of the problem. Nature builds a very different kind of complexity, with a lot of redundancy built in. How about the term “non-redundant complexity” instead of plain “complexity.” Dominance hierarchies are indeed part of the problem, but I think the problem is just as much a problem of lack of redundancy.
United States Army War College
Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army
August 2019
https://climateandsecurity.org/2019/08/01/army-war-college-the-u-s-military-is-precariously-underprepared-for-climate-change/
https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/implications-of-climate-change-for-us-army_army-war-college_2019.pdf
Convoluted, complicated and obscure, perhaps? Or in plain English: Shitty systems engineering.
With a truly distributed and self-organizing system, the dominance hierarchies becomes implicit. For an example: Does a large tree dominate other smaller trees? To an extent, yes, but it is an explicit functionality of the genome from which it is “programmed” to grow according to an evolved set of rules and behaviors. It is not actively “trying” to dominate.
Our monkey brain dominance schemes for sure works in a small scale and group, but breaks down horribly once the sphere of influence becomes too large and detached from the people which it influences and asserts dominance over, such as with IC and it’s horrible concentrations of might, manufacturing capability and access to resources.
It is of primary importance to rid ourselves from explicit dominance hierarchies and let the forces of evolutionary competitive collaboration exist in a true free market economy replace the non-robust government corporate complex, which carry the brunt of responsibility of taking mankind into the predicament which we are now dealing with.
” to rid ourselves from explicit dominance hierarchies”
There is at least a million years of selection for the genetic traits involved. It would take genetic engineering and what came out the far side might be a long way from current humans.
Those currently at the top of the “dominance hierarchies ” are in charge. Do you think they are particularly interested in breaking down hierarchies? Or even remodeling them after “competence” instead of dominance.
Do you really think there is a choice?
The dominance hierarchies must become implicit instead of explicit, thus either they:
1. Do it voluntarily, or
2. Do it in tears while the systems of IC collapse
Which looks to be the better choice?
semiconductor fab. A nikon stepper vision engine cant find its datum points. A plasma chamber particle count causes etch or deposition blockages. A semiconductor fab is a perfect example of complexities constant failures, It is nothing but a series of mechanical, pneumatic. electrical and process failures that must be repaired using intensive resources or production ceases.
Since 99.99% denies IC could collapse…
It all seems pretty straight forward to fix that optical issue you are having? What is complex about that? As a reference; try fixing a malfunctioning gene in your body or a dying biome on earth. It is all very intricate and in many cases intractable to amend at all.
The semiconductors, however, is a complex piece of kit. The same applies to the software running on said semiconductors/computers used for engineering and research purposes.
But those are not truly material in the same sense as the DNA encodes a functionality as a rather complex molecule. The encoder is irrelevant, the encoding is not.
This is an example of hydro and wind from the island of Tasmania south of Australia. Still, imports from Victoria are needed or used to save on water? Or cheaper?
http://crudeoilpeak.info/wp-content/uploads/20191018-Tasmania.png
Victoria is run on brown coal with bursts of wind during a southerly change
http://crudeoilpeak.info/wp-content/uploads/20191018-Victoria.png
You might talk to the people in the utility of Tasmania about how the decision to use imports is made. My guess is that hydroelectric has to be used to some extent when it is available, in other words, when it rains. (Only a small portion can be saved for later.) This is the reason for the big exports on four days, and smaller exports on three days. Most days, hydroelectric provides less electricity than Tasmania needs, so it has to buy imported electricity. The pattern might look a little different at another time of year.
It isn’t clear to me the reason to adopt a supposed photovoltaic ERoEI of 9.4:1. The outstanding Ferroni and Hopkirk paper stated 0.8:1 and the most vibrant critic to that paper were able to raise this figure to only 2.7:1 after a dept analysis and wishful revision:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-11-08/another-failure-of-scientific-peer-review-a-completely-wrong-paper-on-the-energy-return-of-photovoltaic-energy-1/
I have met Ferrucio Ferroni. He is a retired fellow who wants to figure out what really is happening. He doesn’t have to write papers that others will like.
The Ferroni and Hopkirk paper relates to Solar PV used in Switzerland and Germany. These areas are not good for Solar PV, so they would be expected to have relatively low EROEI.
The IEA has published guidelines for evaluating Solar PV. I have read them and complained about them. They are basically wishful thinking guidelines. I believe that they want you to use 5 years beyond the guarantee period as the expected lifetime. The guidelines require the use of very narrow boundaries regarding energy inputs. The guidelines lead to consistently high estimates of EROEI, I expect. They don’t look back at how long solar PV actually lasts, or whether there are a lot of panels that don’t work. They mostly assume the best possible result.
Ferroni and Hopkirk are looking at how long the solar PV really lasted, and what the effect of not having perfectly clean modules really was. I can’t say that I am able to review the paper in detail, but it reminds me, in some ways of what Pedro Prieto and Charlie Hall did in Spain, in “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution,” with similarly low results.
All of the published aggregate number you see are from the “wishful thinking” calculations. I haven’t tried to fight the wishful thinking EROEI battle here.
A lot of conflict seems to arise. Ugo Bardi, who is one of the Resilience authors of the article that objects to Ferroni’s paper, writes books for the Club of Rome. His work tends to be quite optimistic. So I imagine that he might take offense at Ferroni and Hopkirk’s paper.
Graham Palmer was writing a book for Springer. He wanted things to come out at least reasonably well, which would seem like the reason he selected a fairly high starting EROEI. Graham Palmer never even mentions the battery analysis in his end of the book summary of important findings. I wonder if he was embarrassed that the result came out so badly.
In general, solar panels have been coming down in cost, so I would expect that EROEI would be increasing. It would be easier to believe an EROEI of 9.4 now in a sunny location than it would have been a few years ago.
Very good. In all of the feel-good stories I’ve read about how “renewables” can power our technological societies, in addition to getting rid of emissions (supposedly), I’ve never seen a complete analysis, including the stuff you mention here but also the resources needed, the sustainability, or not, of the infrastructure, the realistic speed of deployment, the limits of generation and the unintended consequences, such as other kinds of pollution.
“Renewables will save us” is certainly a pipedream but, of course, that leaves the question:can we be saved? Personally, I see no evidence that collapse of societies and ecosystems can be avoided. Humans will continue to behave in the same way until they physically cannot.
It seems like a lot of studies we see are wishful thinking about what might be done without very much understanding of the issues involved. No one has the motivation to explain how poorly a transition might work.
We can get a little idea of the materials it takes to make wind turbines from Alice Friedemann’s 2015 post, , 900 Tons of material to build just 1 windmill.
Part of what she says is
I am doubtful that the energy cost of transporting all of this stuff to where it is placed is really included in EROEI analyses. It is one of the things that varies from wind turbine to wind turbine, so it is easy to omit.
I respectfully point out that a mediaeval windmill could be put up by one carpenter, one blacksmith, and about two dozen peasants under the supervision of a Master Builder.
Bottom line for the onrushing future: if it cannot be built by your village, it cannot be built.
By the way, the house currently being built about 100 yards from mine is indeed being built by my village.
I have a rooftop solar system on my home with a Tesla Powerwall II battery tied to it. The system is connected to our utility grid. Last year my system generated 2000 kWh more electricity than I used from the grid. This excess energy was used by my utility to supply other costumers. The retail value of this energy was $800. My Tesla battery is able to power my house at night probably 80% of the time without the need for grid power. This leads me to two questions: 1. What if my utility installed a Tesla Powerwall on my home for their storage of excess intermittent energy. What if 90% of homeowners on our island of Hawaii had similar systems with utility owned storage batteries on these homes? This would provide local, non intermittent distributed energy to the utility. The utility would always have reserve energy in storage.
Here’s the downside: the demand for utility owned energy from customers would drastically drop. So, what does the utility do for operating revenue (normally provided by energy sales)?
A. There are no easy answers.
B.At some ;point the battery needs replacement, figure in the cost of the battery, depreciate appropriately and add that cost into your electrical bill – it is a real cost unless you will abandon the property prior to the battery failing.
C. The doomers figure why bother, there is some wisdom in ;prolonging the inevitable, nice going.
D. What is your cost ;per kilowatt hr in HI?
Dennis L.
Retail cost is $0.40 per kWh. My utility gives me a credit of $0.105 per kWh for electricity I export to the grid. But at the end of the 12 month “reconciliation” period, any built up energy credits are forfeited to my utility. So I had about 2000 kWh in energy credits at the end of the 12 months, all forfeited to my utility. At their retail rate, this is valued at $800. A nice deal for my utility and functions as a disincentive for homeowners to install systems that will supply lots of power to the grid.
There are a lot of issues involved:
1. A lot of the utility’s costs are fixed. They would not go away, no matter how little you bought from the utility, even if you bought a smaller amount. They need to charge you a monthly bill, if you are connected to the grid at all. The service of “being there” for you in a case of outages is a huge one.
2. It is not just you and your neighbors that are connected to the electric grid. There are businesses of various kinds. For example, there are airports, police stations, hotels, a US military base, and hospitals. Even if you think that could supply yourself and your neighbors, the issue is more about supplying all of the businesses and government organizations, all of the time. I doubt that you could come anywhere close by adding batteries. All of the fixed costs would still be there.
3. The electricity that the grid buys from you is not really worth very much to the grid. That is why it is paying you so little.
4. Adding batteries that only catch the tops of peaks is a very inefficient usage of batteries. You still have the high cost of batteries, but you get very little benefit from them. This is a big reason why no one wants to add very much electricity storage. Overbuilding solar and wasting part of it may very well be the cheaper option.
I guess my point is that in terms of a long term business model, any utility that gets most of its revenue from sales of energy does not have an incentive to encourage its customers to generate their own electricity (via rooftop solar systems for example). In fact, their best business strategy would be to discourage such systems. As for using battery storage, the costs are dropping and the issue of life cycle have not been demonstrated by real world example yet (at least for my Tesla-which is only 1 year old). So, the problem for the utility is to find a business model that doesn’t depend on energy sales. Customers should look at generating as much of their own energy as possible. I think these issues can be addressed only by aggressively trying to convert to renewables. If the conversion proves to be not possible due to cost factors or other issues we can discover this in the process of attempting it. And, are we any worse off if we fail? Where will be that is better if we don’t make the attempt?
Transitioning to renewables doesn’t really work, however. It doesn’t matter what we do. We just end up dead. Our system cannot really stand more than a tiny fraction of our energy coming from them, any more than our bodies can survive on grass.
“Aggressively” converting to renewables is like force-feeding humans with grass and hay.
It is the typical brutalist approach. Just shove the “solution” down people’s throats quite figuratively and call it something “nice”, “saving the planet”, “cultural revolution” or “seize the means of production” and hand it to the proletariat.
The Chinese and Russians got their fair share of socialist government corporate complex “solutions” leading to unfathomable misery and death in previous century.
No, quite frankly. I don’t think anyone here really is interested in “final solutions” and “ mülltrennung macht frei”.
https://i.imgflip.com/1go2m6.jpg
I love George Carlin. But, could someone take a stab at my question: why not try it? Assuming the problems regularly posted on this site are real, does anyone have a suggestion for a better way to approach this subject? It seems to be little bit like the problem of aging: one can try all kinds of ways to extend one’s life: yoga, veganism, vitamins,…whatever. But the end result is certain, since we can’t live forever. Yet, many of us try. So, is someone who tries to overcome the rather discouraging evidence that we are running out of energy with no viable replacements being foolish? What should one do instead? It brings to mind the uncertainty of the Green New Deal. I tend towards the notion that even if it is all pie in the sky and doomed to failure, the alternatives seem rather unpleasant, so why not give it a shot?
” why not give it a shot?”
It’s a physics/engineering problem, We know from long and often bitter experience that you have to get the engineering right. If it is not right, you have wasted money and effort where you could be really solving the problems. The engineering has to be right.
I was just last night reading the NTSB report on that pedestrian bridge in Miami that collapsed in March 2018. Six people were killed and ten injured.
“Factors in the collapse included bridge design errors, inadequate peer review of the bridge design, poor engineering judgment and response to the cracking that occurred in the region of eventual failure, and lack of redundancy in the bridge design.”
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2019-HWY18MH009-BMG-abstract.pdf
Screw up on the engineering and people die, companies fail, vast resources are squandered.
Something like GND or power satellites or StratoSolar have to make sense in terms of physics. This often takes smart people with lots of training quite a time to get it right.
BTW, with respect to aging, researchers are getting to understand what is going on well enough that there are some treatments that are actually effective. And if they don’t come along soon enough, people can always try cryonics to make the jump to a more advanced future.
Replying to hkeithenson: But, my system does work. And, it will pay for itself via energy savings in 8 years. The battery is warranted for 10 years, the panels for 25. So, it pencils out as a moneymaker for me. Also, it reduces the amount of grid energy I use to zero if one takes into account the surplus energy I produce, then my net grid energy use becomes negative. The economic problem for the Utility is one that is significant for our overall consumer economy-we are set up to use resources, not conserve them or produce them ourselves.
So, the engineering calculations would say don’t try it, it won’t work. My actual experience says it will. Of course one could throw in all kinds of calculations showing how my personal experience with this system does not take into account all kinds of externalities. But if 90% of my fellow Hawaiians installed such systems on their rooftops, the Utility companies would be hard pressed to stay in business. Solution? Close it down and dismantle the grid. What would businesses do for power? Solar panels are not exclusive to homeowners. I suggest try it even if it does not pencil out for the engineers. I use the same arguments in favor of EVs. Electric vehicles were sneered at by most people 10 years ago. Now you see them commonly here in Hawaii. So my suggestion-make your next vehicle an EV. Charge it yourself using your own rooftop system. And, I’m not some rich guy making this argument. If, in the long run it proves a failure, so what. This web site is based on the arguments (easily defended by calculations) that we are running out of fossil fuels and it will meant the end of our civilization as we know it. Provide me some better use for my accumulated capital right now.
Tesla is a cult and Musk a con man
https://www.solarpaneltalk.com/forum/off-grid-solar/batteries-energy-storage/lithium-ion/379554-tesla-battery-pack/page3
This link is a message board with various commenters talking about tesla battery pack issues.
An additional question is – how much is your solar system contributing to the energy needs of your car/s or transport system and all of the embedded energy in all of the goods and services you purchase?
Here’s old news about a paper that outlines a range of renewable strategies: http://www1.udel.edu/udaily/2013/dec/renewable-energy-121012.html – as I recall, the paper does a pretty good job of sketching out the parameters, even if it glosses over some details.
Sometimes solar or wind farms will incorporate battery storage. This can help mitigate the need to over-build transmission. Power companies will even put storage at a substation when the transformer is getting overloaded at peak times. That can delay the need to upgrade the transformer for a few years.
@Jim K. I’ll give you one guess who sponsored that study. However, the facts are brutally clear. When fossil fuels are gone, the earthlings are next in line. We had a good run, but entropy will be the victor.
This story is from back in 2012. It seems like there were a lot of people building models back then claiming that intermittency would easily go away, as renewables were scaled up, and as long distance transmission lines were added. At most, a small amount of batteries would be needed. Now, we know that it really doesn’t work that way. Weather patterns cover large areas and can last for very long periods. Computer models can easily be way too optimistic.
The study is from a US university, following the tradition of finding a popular research topic, spewing out megabytes of computer generated hype unsupported by a single experimental fact, and so getting the grant. The Royal Society of London should consider amending their motto: as well as “nullius in verba”, add “nihil ex algorismo”
And I found this gem, from the dark unfathomed caves of the article’s ocean: “In this study, reliability was achieved by: expanding the geographic area of renewable generation, …” The geographical area in question ran from New Jersey to Illinois, because as everyone who failed third grade geography knows, when it is winter in New Jersey it is summer in Illinois.
It’s simple. We go back to nuclear, or we go back to the stone age.
Indeed, we must leave no stone unturned in the search for clean, safe, reliable, affordable, sustainable nuclear power. Otherwise we’re going to end up making a living by throwing stones at the local wildlife and at each other.
Nuclear has potential, no doubt.
Unfortunately, humans are doing the technology.
With a half life of 24,000 years (Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years), our ancestors (if any) will have to deal with it.
you are talking about the old Nuclear the systems that Gates and others are working on will use old nuclear waste. There is about 125 years available.
As a teenager, I was a fan of Lyndon Larouche, and hence of nuclear power. (But that was in my salad days, when I was green in judgement.) After learning a bit more physics, I came upon what still seems to me the killer flaw in nuclear fission: the waste products are far more radioactive than the fuel. Because, of course, they have much shorter half lives. And we have no good way of dealing with them, except for one experimental reactor in Russia that it would be too expensive to replicate worldwide.
And the problem with nuclear fusion, of course is that we don’t know how to do it. It has been “ten years away” for 70 years, and the current technology, the Tokamak, has never worked; that is, it has never generated more energy than is being used to run it. Perhaps it could, at a large enough scale, but at such a scale it would be prohibitively expensive, not least in the fossil fuel needed to build it.
There is no technological solution; and even if we found one tomorrow, there is not enough time to deploy it. The only solution is social: a drastic dowscaling of our ambition, our consumption, and, almost certainly, our numbers.
I wrote about this numerous time already, it’s no longer a mere first gen experimental reactor in a garage. It’s whole industrial scale sized program of nuclear waste handling and reprocessing, it includes large breeder reactor, fleet of civil and mil energy producing reactors (of various designs and sizes), temporary and long term storage deposits, and dedicated reprocessing plant working with these diverse type of fuels, plus various academic institutes, mines etc. It’s complex but established, recently modernized, and likely to be expanded sector.
France had similar program, but never finished the entire loop, for variety of reasons incl. their peculiar mil program, and easy access to “fresh” uranium in former African colonies among other things.
China and S Korea are most likely candidates to achieve something along that lines if they commit to it. Plus China is running both domestic and int fusion program.
US nuclear is bankrupt, and their proposal for small modular designs could be eventually ok (likely offshoot of their subs/gov bunker reactors), but it’s not out there running for some time already (at least not revealed) to have any meaningful debate on it, yet it’s being advertised as for potential pre-sale around the world. Besides US tried to sell defective – warping fuel pellets, so only a fool wood shop there..
I’d agree that the time has been squandered in the past two-three decades, especially considering the new revisions of NPPs as sized larger and added safeties take longer time to complete (but the core subsystems last ~60yrs), moreover in many countries the professionals in the sector aged and were not replaced. So, eventual call for crash program buildup if needed would be problematic if not impossible.
Yes WFH I agree with you maybe we are already past the opportunity to move to this type system. It is hard to say if we have the finances to make this work. I came to peak everything by looking at long term investments. I am no longer in the stock market to the chagrin and fear mongering of my brother but I feel that it would be wasted money. As now I am holding cash to see where I can put it. If the desperate need to scale up Nuclear becomes known to the masses the money will show up. I have been watching Bill Gates for sometime and I believe he is just as neurotic as most of us on here about energy and he gets it and says it without scaring people on a subtle level if you will. Terra power has made some great advances but with the trade war with China that has all but stopped because most of the plants were to be built in China.
I think we all would like to see a slow down in consumption because that makes sense. Unfortunately making sense is not what societies do; a soft landing were we just consume less is unlikely to happen. A great depression will lead to wars and killing. I still think there is always the fear of Nuclear war but not paying attention to Viral war. Germ warfare has been under investigated but I believe that Korea and other nations have been developing them by and large unnoticed.
Good point about the professionals in nuclear power aging out. Another problem in scaling up small systems is security issues, not to mention the spent fuel problems.
Denial> that’s a good point about the “trade war” – there was a recent conference called something like US-China decoupling. They mentioned it will have very detrimental effect on joint science-tech projects and innovation pace as you just alluded Gates wanting the actual prototyping and production facilities (and likely some part of development office) in China.. So in effect this is very bad blowback for US as well..
There really is no such thing as sustainable energy, in modern terms (obviously, using fallen branches or coppicing trees for fire could be sustainable) where so much unsustainable infrastructure is needed to harness the power. In the case of nuclear, both the infrastructure and the fuel is unsustainable. We don’t necessarily need to go back to the stone age but we will end up going back to a much lower level of population and technology.
nuclear requires FF…
so “back to the stone age” is the winner!
On the upside, we are unlikely ever to run out of stones.
And if we do run out of stones, we can adopt the (sustainable) solution the South Americans did: obsidian. And that will be around for as long as there are volcanoes.
Nuclear is about ten percent of world energy so going from 440 to 2000+ nuclear power plants is your solution?
Lot of these legacy older reactors are small sized, new stuff/gen of the traditional design is ~1.3GW and larger only, so you need fewer of them, plus as mentioned before the material science improved, so the reactor vessels and access. last longer, efficiency of fuel loading higher, again adding all up fewer number needed.
When one does a calculation of our conversion from FF to nukes by say 2050 the results are staggering. Effectively if we just use mtoe conversions (which may not be the best metric for FF to electrical use) the world would need to build three 1600 MW power plants every 2 days for over another 11000 days. If they were small modular reactors at 2000 MW then 4 of those a day. I doesn’t seem likely even if the conversion rate could be said to be out by a factor of two. It is even more staggering when we apply the numbers to wind and solar. Then we enter into all of the issues with electricity being our energy conduit. Something will have to give – our lavish lifestyles most likely.
We don’t have to build as much..
1. Still lot of natgas and NGL around.
2. Changing the modes of transportation and other high gain transition segments; e.g. towards local/regional train-trolley service also the country side has to be repopulated and (offsite input) de-energized etc.
NPPs + Rail/Trolley + Repop of Countryside/Agri reform + Curbed Frivolous Lifestyle =
Rational transition plan forward, but is it going to be done, most likely not.
So then the only real alternative is “reduce”!! That is not likely to happen, unfortunately, until most of us are forced to do so because prices for nonrenewable energy sources will be beyond the wallet size of most people. Many in the U.S. are already at or near this point, and not happy about it either. As many more devolve to that point, what is to be done? Questions put thusly point to a predicament, and such things do not have solutions ready to hand, or mind, or spirit; but the emotional cost will be counted first.
I think the word “reduce” is a deadly cancer to the way our enery and financial system is structured.
Growth seems to make fixed costs disappear. It leads to economies of scale. Going the other way doesn’t work. It leads to debt defaults.
The end of cultural landscape is inevitable:
“Within 20 years, Japan’s elderly population will cease growing and Japan’s population will be in decline at all levels. But tellingly, Tokyo’s population (representing about 30% of Japan’s total population) is still rising meaning the working age population decline across the remainder of Japan’s rural locations is of epic proportions. This collapse of working age across rural locations, as young head to urban centers in search of opportunity, is being mirrored across the rest of the world and is the final act of the economic decline worldwide.”
https://econimica.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-demographic-depression-will.html
And those young people who – rightly – see no hope in rural areas are abandoning the farmland which has been the bedrock of civilisation, even in the Industrial Age.
Nothing to flee to from the cities, no small farms left to take survivors, the most durable way of life gone, all knowledge of that life vanished…… while we fantasize about ‘Green Transitions’!
When the soil is depleted, your weak plants and low crops destroyed by pests, there is no reason to stay, because the energy that the land can provide is very low, not enough to sustain human species.
The disappearing cheap energy makes agriculture on the depleted soil impossible.
Yes, all very true as well, and sadly so.
We are talking about touching up or remodelling the building, while the foundations have eroded to the point of collapse.
There are an excess of homes in the rural areas, but few jobs. There is a question with what to do with all of the old, sometimes abandoned homes. I understand that sometimes offspring who would inherit these homes decline to accept them, because of high taxes and nothing to do with them.
That’s very true in Spain.
Some people decline inheritances that involve a ‘white elephant property, others hang on to them asking for prices which are wholly out of line with economic reality in those areas.
A lot of nice family houses built in the boom years pre-2008 will be found to be totally worthless and unsaleable, not even worth the maintenance.
This will also apply not just to rural areas on the fringe, but also in towns on a large scale, as the impoverished younger generations cannot afford more than the rental of a small flat or room. To their dismay, they will see rents rise, as in Spain right now…..
Quite a lot of these problems lie in not seeing that building and repairing shelter is somewhat possible even for one with the required intention, but entirely possible with a bit more coherent community planning. What is failing us is the building industry (no longer affordable) but still holding the cards. A cost free alternative is required.
Truly sorry for this pedantry, but since my “work” is “cultural landscape” I want to help avoid confusion as to the jargons people like me depend on for clarity:
https://www.definitions.net/definition/cultural%20landscape
Thanks.
It is about this change of the human shaped landscape.
In our village, we had a house that was old like 100 years, but it was a one of the symbols of our village. This house was inhabited by a Premonstratesian monk who was a geologist and spoke several languages and was born there and also spend his retired age there, as the monasteries of the religious orders were abolished during the communism in Slovakia. He died in the 80s. The village put a commemorative plaque remembering this person on that house.
Recently, his family sold the house and the house was demolished. Some new energy effective house is going to be built there.
That way our village lost one of its historical symbols, while forest is coming closer to it, overgrowing the former agricultural land.
Lets do some simple math shall we:
From https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/07/envision-energy-says-ev-battery-cell-costs-will-fall-below-50-kwh-by-2025/ : In general terms, the current industry standard for EV battery cells is believed to be $145 per kWh. Battery pack prices are believed to be around $190 per kWh.
From https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-households-in-the-us/ : In 2018, there were 127.59 million households in the United States.
From: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3; : In 2016, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,766 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of 897 kWh per month.
Taking those three numbers one can calculate the ideal theoretical costs for lithium ion batteries for for three days of power would cost:
897KwH/30days = ~30Kwh/day of power needed for three days of battery backup.
So for a three day outage we need (30*3) or about 90Kwh of power.
90Kwh * $145 = ~$13,000 per household cost for batteries.
There are 128 million households in the US so 128000000 * $13,000 = ~$1.6T dollars of battery
costs for every household in the US. And, residential is only 1/3 of the total so to cover residential and commercial/industrial use we have: 3 * 1.6T = ~$5T in battery costs alone. USA GDP is about 19T. So, 25% of our entire GDP will be consumed by purchasing batteries. A parasitic cost that isn’t needed now will have to be added to keep our system going. This cost will recur every 7 to 10 years as batteries have to be wholly replaced. And it doesn’t take into account the costs of hauling off/recycling the old batteries. Nor does it account for the transmission losses that will occur since the batteries will not be located at each household. Still five trillion Dollars ever 7 to 10 years is a massive number. At $50/bbl, the US burns about $300Billion dollars worth of oil every year. So, the 7 to 10 year battery cost is the equivalent to the cost of about 16 years of US oil consumption. And that is just batteries!
Hopefully my numbers are wrong because it is really shocking.
I didn’t check your numbers, but this illustrates the problem.
Also, if you start storing much energy in the batteries, there tends to be a storage loss. This adds to the cost of the batteries.
Yes, and apart from the mere eff. storage loss you more importantly also have to derate the nominal capacity for keeping (buffer) higher state of (dis)charge in order to extend the longevity. In today’s world lets say at least by ~25%, so the example above assumed 90kWh batt pack which means 112kWh, hence also even higher cost.
But in reality such large batt pack is sheer craziness in the first place, consult that TED video above. Apart from people blasting a/c in plywood mega houses, very few in fact need such excess footprint, ~20-40kWh for home storage should be enough. But we don’t have currently manuf capacity even for that and the price would be still too much.
There could be a breakthrough in this area but this would have to be orders of magnitude for true mass adoption so unlikely.
If each home and business had a battery for backup the cost in Dollars and resources would be enormous. But, would probably be the most efficient and reliable way to do backups. I would agree that centralized, very large batteries, would loose a lot of efficiency and the costs and size would be crazy. Either way, I don’t think battery storage is feasible.
There is one solar proposal I know about that gets around the battery problem entirely. It even gets around the PV problems with multiple cloudy days. That is StratoSolar http://www.stratosolar.com/
The storage mechanism is mass (sand perhaps) that is lifted 20 km up under the platforms when there is excess energy and lowered to supply power when the sun goes down. At 20 km, clouds just don’t exist so the PV output is completely predictable.
I worked on the physics and economics of this project some years ago. The cost to produced power is around 3 cents per kWh without storage and 5 cents per kWh with storage. It’s more expensive than projected power satellite electricity, but not much.
It probably will not meet Gail’s criteria. $10/bbl synthetic oil needs zero cost energy to make and I don’t know how to do that.
Your are right in that the energy (wind and sunshine) is free/cheap but the devices to capture it are hugely energy intensive. The only real application (at least in my mind) for solar is to grow plants and warm water. The wind can be used to lift water and move ships. But, that is about the extent of what solar and wind can do in the long run.
Gregory, wind can also turn windmills, as the Dutch have proved over centuries.And you can see an English one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFcnF1yS4o4.
Heage windmill in Derbyshire; and yes, it is a working flour mill, built in 1797. There is no energy conversion, so it is over 90% efficient. The feeder into the grindstone is agitated by the primary drive shaft, so when the wind slows down, so does the feed of wheat into the grinder: the system is in almost perfect homeostasis.
And a big green bonus: it doesn’t kill birds. Modern windmills are sited to catch the prevailing winds, which also happen to be migratory bird routes. So we save the planet by exterminating all its migratory birds? What is wrong with this picture?
Cutting off electricity consumption when it is windy out (for fear of starting electrical fires) doesn’t seem like it makes very good use of wind turbine output either.
Bill Gates is trying to be more realistic about what we can expect from solar and wind. I see
in the comments (on YouTube) that folks think this video was edited to make it appear that Bill is being more honest about the real value to “renewables”. Nonetheless, something I learned and that gail points out so eloquently is: how does one backup a solar or wind farm when the sun is shining or wind isn’t blowing? Well, right now you have to have either a large coal or natural gas power plant to step in and take up the slack. This is a huge problem because that power plant has to be ready 24/7 to take up the slack at a moments notice. That means they must be staffed,
fueled and ready to rescue the faltering wind and solar panels. Think about that for a minute. That
means for every solar or wind installation you have to build the equivalent in fossil fuel power for
backup. So, how is that helpful? How do you pay for all that extra coal and natural gas to be transported and burned. How do you pay all those salaries for those workers that have to be at
those backup power plants? You can’t idle a coal or natural gas power plant either. They always
have to be burning some fuel to keep the water boiling and ready to produce steam to turn the
generators. How is this saving energy? How then are solar and wind replacing fossil fuels?
So, the only other “solution” is to have battery backup. As Gail has stated here and numerous
times before, the battery costs in both terms of dollar and resources would be enormous. I have
read that there isn’t enough lithium to do it even at today’s levels of electric consumption unless
vast stores of economic lithium are discovered.
Look at that chart Gail has up (which I love)! It shows how the EROEI gets knocked down harder
and harder every time the batteries are due for replacement every 7 to 10 years. It is like trying to run a 20 mile marathon and getting hit by a truck every 5 miles. Dang! That is why I always say solar and wind or “renewables” are a treadmill to nowhere. Fossil fuels can blast us to the moon
but solar and wind won’t even get us off the ground.
Actually, I think that there is a plan to how much reserve capacity is available at any given time. It is not that all plants need to be ready for operation, immediately. Only selected ones need be available. So the situation isn’t quite a bad as it sounds. But there is still a problem if bondholders need to be repaid, insurance policies need to be purchased, and workers need to feed their families 365 days a year.
About half of lithium reserves are in Chili, but there is a problem with having enough water for extraction there. Prices are not doing very well either.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/lithium-price-trends-july-2019-benchmark-minerals.png
Another major export from Chili is copper. Without higher prices on exports, it is hard to have political stability.
I should mention, too, that lithium is not as critical for batteries for electricity as it is for batteries for vehicles. The electrical system can use big heavy batteries that cars and laptops cannot use.
Thank you, Gail, for another thought provoking article. Given the premises, I cannot fault the conclusions. But please let me address this premise:
“What the world economy needs is a variety of different energy types that match the energy requirements of the many devices in place in the world today. ”
Turn it around: “What the world needs is a variety of devices that match the energy types that will be available.”
Feel free to disagree, but it still seems to me that this rephrases a predicament into a problem. Let me offer one example: replace heavier than air flight with lighter than air flight. For an energy efficiency of 10 times (for people) and 20 times (for cargo) and power sources that need not rely on fossil fuel.
It takes time and resources of many kinds to change devices to match the energy types that are available. I talk about 50 years in the article as the time frame for making the changes to adapt devices to the new energy supplies, but I think that it is basically impossible to make many of the needed changes.
The economy basically evolves to become more efficient and more complex. Everyone needs to be highly trained in such a system. If there is any minor perturbation to such a system, it tends to collapse. I can’t imagine such a system lasting very long.
“Complexity is the enemy of reliability.” I agree 100% with everything you say.
My own belief is that our best way forwards is a crash, followed by a new civilisation that will learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. But on the other hand, the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history.
Best wishes.
I was thinking more in terms of solar and wind penetration >70 or 80%. We are only like 5% now or so. It seems to me that the more “renewables” that go on the grid the more essential it will become to offset that with additional fossil power plants. Unless batteries can take up the slack (which I don’t believe they can).
Germany is having a hell of a time at 30% “renewables”. I think grid instability is under appreciated.
“The electrical system can use big heavy batteries that cars and laptops cannot use.” That is true. Be interesting calculation to see how much lead that would take as opposed to how much is available.. Lead is a very recyclable metal. But, there is energy costs there too with transport (heavy) and refining (heat).
It just seems that all the effort spent on batteries would be a huge drain on the overall EROEI of a “renewable” electric supply and distribution system. And to think fossil fuels don’t need any of those extra add-ons to make them work and they used to be $5.00 per barrel. Simply amazing. It is no small wonder fossil fuels reigned supreme all these years.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
Even prior to the use of ‘renewable’ energy sources utilities could be stressed by weather events. Any prolonged heat wave or cold snap could have dire consequences as the system capacity would be exceeded. The pressure in natural gas pipelines would drop when temperatures fell far below normal. To cope service had to be curtailed to non essential users. Summer A/C loads have the same problem during exceptionally hot weather. Customers were told to reduce power usage or face rotating blackouts.
Relying on ‘renewable’ power sources would make these infrequent events routine. Rather than scale up renewable for primary power generation people should make them a back up source of power should the primary supplier encounter problems. Grocery stores e.g have large roofs that could support solar panels sufficient to keep frozen and perishable food items during a power outage though I note Walmart has experienced several roof fires with the solar panels they installed which kind of shows the technology is not that mature. Certainly not mature enough to be a primary power source
I don’t think that using renewables for backup would work very well. A diesel generator, with a suitable supply of diesel fuel, would be a much cheaper and more reliable choice.
The solar system would be expensive to install in the first place. It would be even more expensive, if it has backup batteries. Usually, the system is designed to provide whatever electricity it generates into the grid (possibly net of use by the consumer). If the grid goes down, the solar panel system will go down as well.
Trying to have a panel system with backup batteries as a backup system would be horribly expensive and not very reliable. These presumably would not be connected to the grid. The only time the owner would get benefit from them would be the times when the owner choses to connect, in a power outage. The system would presumably be available, to the extent of its battery backup, but beyond that, its benefit would be very iffy. The owner would still need a diesel-powered generator if the cloudy period was long-lasting. The batteries would eventually need to be replaced, even with little electricity consumption by the owner, because batteries tend to degrade over time. It would make more sense to charge the batteries off grid electricity (with no solar panels), and use the batteries for temporary backup. This is what the backup batteries for home computers do.
Regarding the Walmart roof fires, Arstechnica says that Walmart makes the following claims in its lawsuit against Tesla:
Thanks for the new article Gail. Strong stuff: commentary from all quarters suggests that the ‘renewables’ storyline is ever less convincing., and has not been thought out at all.
Looking at those Walmart problems, just imagine what dangerous installation faults would arise with a mass introduction of solar panels, as inexperienced contractors piled in to get the work! Let alone manufacturing defects……
Mass wall insulation went horribly wrong in Britain for that reason, leading to lots of serious damage through damp, and that is very simple in comparison.
@Gail I’m a mechanical engineer who specializes in this field. There’s nothing more I could intelligently add to your post, even if I wanted to.
Thanks!
Gail, sterling work as ever.
Here in the UK, the Labour party has just released their “fast-track strategy for a net-zero economy by 2030”, and at first glance it is the confused, techno-utopian document you would expect:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ThirtyBy2030report.pdf
They are at least honest enough to admit (to anyone prepared to wade through the first 196 pages) that they don’t really have a strategy for de-carbonising large-scale agriculture, shipping, trucking, aviation, infrastructure maintenance etc:
“It is key to note that all the GHG figures and conclusions… relate only to the energy sector (heating and electricity).
“They do not reflect the whole emissions of the UK—such as those from agriculture or transport. Nor do they reflect the carbon embodied in the consumption of imported goods. Therefore, any statement made below about whether the strategy outlined in this document achieves the ambition of either the Paris Agreement or Climate Change Act is only from the point of view of the energy sector’s contribution. To deliver the Paris Agreement targets, very significant action will be required in other sectors.”
This was a new one on me:
“Begin converting buildings currently using natural gas for heating to use heat pumps and hybrid heat pumps, as well as introduce increasing levels of renewable or low-carbon hydrogen blended within natural gas supply…
“Renewable or low-carbon hydrogen is hydrogen that has be produced without GHG emissions, through either natural gas reformation combined with carbon capture and storage, or through the electrolysis of water using renewable electricity.
Do you know anything about low-carbon hydrogen? Sounds expensive!
I read a few pages of that Labour party thing—it’s just a catch all for the Extinction rebellion crowd
They have no hope of doing most, probably any, of it
All this talk of “converting buildings” or “tearing down buidlings” and replacing it with XYZ is craziness. Conversion means throwing away devices (many that still work) loaded with embedded energy and replacing them with more energy intensive devices. Tearing down building (The Green New Deal) is just ludicrous. Unless the new device last forever and uses no additional energy (an impossibility) it solves nothing. It is more aptly defined as being wasteful.
i read a few pages in before coming to the same conclusion
reworking xx million buildings—and so on and on
demonstrated clearly that the proposers were just pulling figures out of the air to make a good news package to please the people who needed something to believe in
This is an NREL article about a Wind-to-Hydrogen project. It seems to use electrolysis to produce the hydrogen.
According to the article, “After compressing the hydrogen, it is stored for later use at the site’s hydrogen fueling station or converted back to electricity and fed into the utility grid during peak-demand hours.”
So it is a way of saving off-peak electricity generation until later.
This is a PDF from the International Renewable Energy Agency that seems to talk about something similar.
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2018/Sep/IRENA_Hydrogen_from_renewable_power_2018.pdf
Some time ago I posted a link to a DYI who did something like that. Even in industrial settings hydrogen wants to leak everywhere, from every fitting and even migrate into steel vessels.https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/hydrogen-embrittlement
Liquid hydrogen is not much easier to work with and on a large scale Discovery demonstrated it can be a handful. Hindenberg showed similar effects in the 1930’s I believe.
:Pumped water still seems to be the most reasonable, I sometimes look at two unused silos on the farm and muse about water in and water out.
DennisL.
I ran across another article on low carbon hydrogen. https://energypost.eu/u-s-nuclear-plants-to-produce-carbon-free-hydrogen/
This one relates to using nuclear power plants to produce hydrogen when wind and solar are producing too much intermittent electricity. One planned use seems to be time-shifting of the electricity generated by the nuclear plant. Also, commercial applications are anticipated:
It’s been truly amazing to me to witness first hand the misinformed narratives swirling around renewables and supposed ‘Green New Deals’. We have just completed our 4-year federal political cycle in Canada with our national Green Party promising a host of benefits from their plan for the future. The most significant is the idea that we cannot only transition seamlessly completely off of fossil fuels to ‘renewables’ but do so in a way that will be a benefit everyone with additional wealth and jobs. I have been vilified by some fellow commenters online when I point out the disingenuousness of this narrative given the complexities and impossibility of it. There is, without a doubt, the widespread belief that we can have our cake and eat it too. Is there too much faith in these ‘models’ that suggest we can easily substitute renewables for fossil fuels? I absolutely believe so. I also believe that so long as governments pursue the infinite growth chalice on a finite planet, we are fubar; and a significant cause of this seems to be our reliance on a debt-/credit-based monetary system. I suppose as Charles Hugh Smith recently argued: if we don’t change the way money is created and distributed, nothing else changes.
the great mass of people tend to confirm truths which are themselves untrue
because the actual truth is too scary to tell
or be believed
Never a truer word has been spoken or typed, Norman.
The actual truth as I saw it while sitting in a hot bath last night is that collectively we are pursuing complexity in an effort to increase efficiency, and encouraging consumption in order to foster a growing economy with a view to maintaining prosperity and postponing catastrophe in the face of rising disparities, declining affordability, and relentless entropy.
Then I remembered that there are billions of people who can’t afford a nightly or even a monthly hot bath, and billions more who are likely to say: “How Dare You! You should lower your carbon footprint.A cold shower is good enough for the likes off you!”
lol
I had exactly the same thought
A rainwater butt or horse trough in the backyard has always been good enough for the lower orders
Only the lord of the manor should be able to afford serving wenches (at a farthing a month) to carry hot water up to where he takes his annual bath (whether he needs one or not)
Actually, we are not pursuing complexity at all, we are leaving the complexity of the biosphere behind as we move into super-artificial habitats increasingly more dependent on a singular form of geological, fossil, non-renewable resources to function.
From a systems engineering and evolutionary perspective, it is a reduction in complexity, self-organization and interdependence. Cut the FF’s and watch the thin veil of IC tear apart into savagery, misery and death. It is a horrible system with a razor thin functional safety margin.
I don’t think the problem is money and how it is created; it is diminishing resources in many ways. World population keeps rising, especially in Africa and Asia. Extraction of resource keeps becoming more difficult. Complexity becomes greater, resulting in more uneven distribution of income and accumulated wealth. Investors still need to make a profit (so that they have a way of making additional investments), comparing finished goods out to resources in. Fewer and fewer finished goods and services are produced, relative to the inputs to the economy, because of diminishing returns and the need to use part of the output to fight pollution (entropy). The whole system stops working, regardless of how money is created and distributed.
The ultimate problem is that too little finished goods and services are produced, relative to the population and relative to inputs. If finished goods and services are distributed evenly, in not very long, the whole population starves. If resources are distributed in some other way (related to how a person is helping the system, perhaps), it is likely that part of the population will survive a temporary bottleneck. This is the way the physics of the system is set up. This is what has allowed populations to evolve over the years.
Money is a way of distributing finished goods and services. It also can be used as an incentive to those working within the economy. But it cannot solve underlying resource and growing population problems, I am afraid.
As the previous post closed I could not update the sub thread there.
But just for the illustration of your point of energy extraction difficulties, one modern gas offshore platform: $10B, 5+ yrs, 15x Eiffel towers of steel, 3x Wembley stadium of concrete, .6Mt dry and 1.3Mt ballasted weight, .. plus plethora of other extra accessories needed..
oops botched this one sorry, should read $1-2B in today’s money..
oops, the labyrinth of NOK/USD x real inflation is madness, so today’s budget would be more like $5B and with redevelopment/updates perhaps $10B for the lifespan of it..
“cannot solve underlying resource and growing population problems”
It’s not a new problem. Too many people for the resources may date back a million years or more. The response, when a tribe could see bleak times a-coming, was to work up hate (xenophobic memes) against the neighbors and attack.
Win or loss there were fewer mouths to feed and taking the young women of the losers as booty kept the genes for this behavior from being lost.
Since the industrial revolution, we have increased the available resources, particularly food many fold as well as the population.
There may be technological fixes that would get us out of the mess we are in. Unfortunately, humans in “war mode” are irrational.
Never considered the gene effect, and of course only the best would be taken and by definition those doing the taking were on the male side the winners. Genetics is unemotionally efficient. A very elegant explanation.
Dennis L.
I like to think money (or the abundance of it) is related to how much natural resource we as a society have at our disposal. If we were to rapidly loose our access to resources, I think money would become worthless. And if we suddenly came into a lot of cheap energy, the money supply would have to be increased to support all the new jobs that consume the new energy supplies. So, in this sense I don’t think we have a money problem. It isn’t really a banker problem either. We are overshooting our resource base.
I am unable to cite numbers or offer proof but my generalized gut feeling is that the type of “money” impacts true productivity. A fiat-based, unbacked monetary system enables and enhances non-productive /non-value-added activity.
Take the commodity futures- or paper contracts /options. They were originally developed as insurance programs to protect the farmer in case of acts of God that destroyed his crop, forcing him into bankruptcy and unable to afford the seed and fertilizer to plant the following year. Those were necessary paper contracts and the beginning of the casino. It seems to me that fiat money allows a host of bad things, like supercharged borrowing from the future, the creation of a plethora of casino-like trading schemes and bets, and the financialization of the economy, not creation of actual true wealth. A gold standard acted as a check reign to this runaway fiat-based profligacy.
I also wonder about the coincidence of the emergence of centralized banking (around 1696?) and the discovery of fossil fuels with the subsequent rapid industrialization and enabling of a population explosion from 1 billion to 7.5 billion- thanks to mechanized farming, transportation, and fertilizers. There has been a gradual drift away from backing of currencies, to the point that all currencies in the world are now fiat, and fiat currencies all have the bad habit of eventually becoming worthless.
In short, does fiat currency discourage real wealth production and instead promote non-productive wealth transfer instead of creation through “financialization?”
What is the relationship between fossil fuels and the emergence of an increasingly fiat based currency worldwide? Are we talking coincidence or cause and effect, and if so how much correlation.? Did fiat currency supercharge our use (wasting) of fossil fuels to the point that we have burned our candle at both ends- from an energy perspective as well as the financial perspective?
That’s very good way of reasoning and effort few dare to inquire, yet it’s the key vector worth debating and studying.
Some argue, the original sin goes way back to the weird concept of money itself and time delay function per given value. Because loans-charging interest and various banking and alike complex financial betting instruments as such (not necessarily dominant driver) existed in the Antiquity and likely even earlier.
So, in that line the post 17th century model of emboldened CBs through stock market and derivative scams and such is just an evolution. Although one must also observe the supercharging factor – new leverage through fossil fuels – made possible a complete phase shift – precisely in the sense of bankers coming out after centuries of doing this in junior partnership with ruling class of the day only. In other words since late 17th century this became the dominant ruling-conquering force and not looking back. The roles just flipped as “the Capital” became the sovereign ruler while state entities were demoted into the junior role of enforcers in various respective fields of administrating complex society.
Side note, such development and realignment was obviously discovered no later than by mid 19th century already, hence the original critique of the Capital, which rightly saw royal houses of that era as not the primary targets, they were merely junior partners of the Capital at best if not only hired – propped up legacy puppets with few actionable levers on their own.
In terms of fossil fuels, here comes the marriage in hell, because the relative function of time in money was necessary condition to allow for such “seeding” investments in coal and later other complex energy carrier extraction and distribution schemes (e.g. rail).
Fast forward to present time, so, the financialization at certain threshold even managed to overshot the viability of resource extraction both in terms of energy surplus and overall life supporting biodiversity layer.
Now, what is “not certain” is the way forward.
It’s either full steam ahead into a Seneca Cliff event. Or perhaps one or series of large GFCs events braking neck of the virtual financial superstructure first and allowing finding way lower consumption plateau down the road – based on different (or none) concept for money – resource allocation/distribution.
On more macro zoomed out space-time level if one perceives humanoids as tasked with the role of (yet another) terraforming agent rushing another geological time, these debates are sort of just describing workings of way larger machine, so it doesn’t matter afterall.
It would be interesting to analyse the interplay between energy consumption and changing demographics over the longer term. https://econimica.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-demographic-depression-will.html
With plateauing or declining populations, how does this affect the energy affordability issue? Maybe the decline in available ‘human energy’ will need to be filled with fossil fuels and renewables, but can we afford it? In Japan for example, maybe the decline in populations will necessitate increasing automation and robotics to take care of the elderly (with proportional increase in use of electricity?
The demographic changes certainly add to all of the world’s problems.
There is really a two way push. There is the “way too many” working age people in what is called “rest of world.”
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2019/10/21/40246456-15716348048476045.png
They create a huge population who wants to immigrate. The deficit of young workers elsewhere makes at least some of the political leaders want to allow immigration. We have already been seeing how this plays out.
There is also a very near-term financial problem, which is already taking place. Too many of the young people, especially, cannot afford the output of the economy. They cannot afford families and new homes. They are paying ridiculous amounts for a college education, and interest on loans to provide this education. The economy is already heading for a crash, even before the demographic issues that Chris Hamilton writes about. So, yes demographic changes are an issue. They are hitting us right now, along with the many other issues we are encountering.
If we could sail through to the 2020s and 2030s, I agree that they would be a problem. I don’t think that that is possible, however.
The economy basically cannot
this guy gives the best add on to the Gates vid above on renewable energy
I corresponded with David Mackay from the middle of 2008 till just before cancer got him in 2016. He was one of the few people I ever met who could look at the whole picture. I miss him to this day. Here is what he wrote in his blog on power satellites.
Sustainable Energy – without the hot air
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Solar power from space?
When I published Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, there were quite a few topics I could have included but didn’t because they seemed a little too blue-sky. For example I have draft chapters on Osmotic Power and on Kite Power (and if I were to rewrite the book today I think that I would now include Kite Power after all). Another idea I dismissed at the time was “what if we put solar panels in space, in geo-synchronous orbit?” I dismissed that idea on the grounds that “the advantage of space over the deserts of Libya and Nevada as a location for solar panels is only roughly a factor of 4, and surely that’s outweighed by the difficulty and cost of getting panels (and associated power-re-transmission systems) into space, compared with just plopping them on the ground in a desert?” However, Keith Henson has for some time been working out the details of a scheme that might prove me wrong.
It involves many clever ideas, and some ambitious ones – such as the idea of powering a Skylon freight-delivery space-craft by space lasers that are powered from the ground with GW-scale microwave transmitters! I encourage people who are interested to read Keith’s ‘dollar a gallon’ post and his follow-up post.
http://withouthotair.blogspot.com/2014/09/solar-power-from-space.html
[David replied to one of the comments]
David MacKay FRS said…
Hang on, “anonymous” – you say “you can solve the problem by storage”. Yes, but hang on – what is the cost of that storage going to be? Think about the whole system, cost it out, and then see if you can beat that cost with the solar-from-space invention – that is what Keith Henson is saying. If you want to see some possibly-helpful thoughts about the role of storage and current costs and target costs for storage, please take a look at the paper I cite at the end of my blog post, on “Solar power in the context of…”.
September 18, 2014 at 6:12 AM
A good presentation, even from Ted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/23/how-nasa-could-help-stop-climate-change-with-solar-satellites
It’s not very accurate. The comments are even worse. But I suppose any mention at all is better than none
The author says, “But because our space tech is so much better than China’s, our solar satellites could grab that market — and the high-wage aerospace jobs that would come with it — before 2030.”
I asked at the Space Solar conference a couple of weeks ago how far away electricity from space might be. I asked about twenty years, and the answer I received was, “No, certainly not that soon. It depends on funding, how many people are working on it, and many other things.” Someone said, “Possibly 25 years.”
It seems like the more that is learned, the more obstacles that are found that seem to need to be worked around. The length of the output outage around the spring and fall equinoxes seems to be longer, for example. (Forty days, in both spring and fall, making the satellites less of a stand alone source of power.) There are all kinds of US requirements regarding what kind of testing must be done before devices can be put up in space, adding to timing and costs. Rectennas, and hitting rectennas from space, seem to be more of a challenge too.
Paul Jaffe from NASA was not there this year. It would have been interesting to hear his thoughts.
The power dropouts around the equinoxes are not a problem. Those times of the year the power demand is lowest. At least for the US, we can use the ground grid to shift power east or west. For other places, we can “cross the beams” and get power from power satellites that are not in eclipse.
This was in response to a report about testing the Skylon heat exchanger. Skylon is one of the possible ways to get the cost to orbit down far enough for power satellites to make sense. To get down to the $100/kg figure takes 1500 flights per vehicle with two reskins. The construction rate for the Skylons is somewhere around 140/month which
requires about a 50% increase in the aircraft industry.
The Reaction Engines engineers don’t think the plume interaction with
the tail section will be a problem, but that’s a topic beyond me.
It may not matter. On power satellite economics I recently posted an
analysis of making $44/bbl synthetic oil from 1.7 cents per kWh PV
power. Took 1/8th of Saudi Arabia or 1/35 of the Sahara for the PV.
Recovered with 60% efficient combined cycle turbines, the power would
cost around 4.3 cents per kWh. This ignores the cost of the combined
cycle plant.
Hydrocarbons will store even seasonal variations in energy demand and
there are plenty of empty oil fields to store them in plus an existing
infrastructure to ship them. I would really like to see the power
satellites come about, but I think they have to make economic sense
and compete with other potential energy solutions.
Rectenna plus power satellite parts, plus mass per kW times cost to
GEO gives you the cost per kW. Divide what you get by 80,000 and that
gives breakeven cost in cents per kWh. Can this compete with the
alternatives? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the human race will be in an awful mess if we
can’t solve the energy problems.
(Zero interest money would sure make them more economical.)
This talk by David MacKay is from 2012. MacKay is a good speaker and makes a lot of good points.
Back in 2012, oil prices were high and we did know as much as we do now about how badly things would work out in scaling up renewables. So it probably might have looked like a transition to renewables might work, especially if part of the Sahara could be used for solar panels, and they could find someone who wanted to “do a deal.” I am afraid that a similar speech now would provide fewer realistic options. We have tried a bunch of things, and the transition looks more like an obstacle course.
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