Discussion on:

Coming soon: 100% renewable power

I have solar panels at my home. I am not 100% self sufficient yet but that is the ultimate goal. If every individual took the initiative to power their own needs, we could end the stalemate. I contend that the stalemate is caused because big business is trying to figure out how to make the huge profit margins they are used to making before they take the plunge.

I'm under 250kWh almost every month, including winter - how many can reduce their footprint, not just cover it?

We use less than 60kWh a month.......! No BS... and we export 300kWh a month to the grid.

http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/more-power-of-energy-efficiency/
http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/?s=powering+up+collapse

I have a traditional sized suburban home and keep my electric usage under 500 kWh six or months of the year...and that is in AZ. I still need to insulate my attic better, but I have dual pane LowE windows, CF bulbs and a gas stove/hot water heater. I haven't developed good habits for reducing the VAMPIRE appliances that use current all the time. When I have two other people living here, I don't really anticipate the need for more than 750 kWh's, so it is definitely possible. My JULY and AUGUST and SEPTEMBER bills are still approximately 1000, 2000 and 1000 kWh's respectively but I am working on getting those down too by using an evaporative cooler as much as possible. If I were to put solar panels on my large south facing roof, I would be producing much more than I use, but I can't afford the panels yet.

I can't afford to buy the panels or the VAWTs for the heavily insulated home I'm building (probably because all of my money is sunk into the house building). But I found I could get Grade A solar cells for $200 for 100 cells. That will make a nice panel, some assembly required. And a couple of DC motors, each for about $50, some wood and some PVC pipe and I'll eventually also have a pair of VAWTs.

It makes me sad to see this conversation and the responses. Renewables in my opinion are an incredible waste of time and resources and will not solve dangerous climate change but make it inevitable. Most people do not live in their own houses or have the means to invest in renewables. This inane drive into renewables will prolong global poverty and prevent fossil fuels from being phased out. Take a look in the future lets say a hundred years from now, do you see the Space Ship Enterprise being powered by solar collectors? The key to human existence and prosperity is a very high density energy source. Only small nuclear reactors powered by Thorium or Uranium can resolve the climate and world poverty problem. All the energy used to launch the space shuttle can be generated with a few gram of Thorium or Uranium.

It could well turn out in 50years time that "renewables" are frowned upon, due to the large environmental impact. The old saying no free lunch stays true. Extracting that amount of energy from the forces of nature could turn out to be bad for the climate. Less energy to heat the earth, less wind power to change the seasons, less tidal power to drive the cyclic changes in the sea.........who knows?

Please, run to you local grocery store and grab a large paper bag and stick you head in it while you run back home. Let us know how that works for you.

@johnbowers - Oh, I really like your debating skills. Please don't misunderstand me, fossil fuels are even worse. As Roland said a longer term solution would probably be some type of nuclear reaction. The by products are more easily controlled than all the CO2 and possible other side effects of even renewables. We can at least put it in a barrel and blast it into space if need be. Bottom line is we should not stop investing in nuclear fusion research.

Did you see where enough solar energy falls on the world in ONE MINUTE to power the entire world for a YEAR? I understand unintended consequences can sometimes cause problems, but I fail to see how harvesting energy from the sun will cause any more problems than planting enough trees to use that energy for photosynthesis. TIDAL energy, and possibly geothermal and wind energy might disrupt things, but not solar IMO. FUSION energy might solve a lot of problems, since the byproducts are essentially HELIUM, but we still haven't been able to access that power yet.

I am baffled by your response. The topic was renewable energy and you went to a process that produces a waist product that we can't control and kills
us faster than air or water pollution.

The byproducts of FUSION are HELIUM and ENERGY...not radioactive energy either!

Read up on Wikipedia how various fusion designs actually work.

The waste product of the immediate reaction could well be helium but the easier fusion processes D-T all involve massive production of energetic neutrons that will convert the surrounding containment vessel into highly radioactive material which could well have to be replaced every year or so. Then there is the issue with tritium, it is radioactive with 12 yr half life, very little of it. To power a working fusion D-T plant you would need many conventional nuclear plants to supply the tritium. Or you use up lithium to make tritium on the fly. The D-D reaction is even harder. The version of fusion that makes no neutrons is even harder.

Fusion is so far off it likely still won't work for another 50 years forever, or at least a few hundred years. It is worth doing though because when we crack it, we will have enough deuterium in the oceans to last several billion years.

We might also hope that Prof Bussard's Polywell and Dr Lerner's Focus Fusion are onto something.

In the mean time we have nuclear power which could move over to breeders to burn up waste or depleted uranium and we have thorium which is relatively a 1000 times cleaner than current once through designs. Fission power U/Th could last for several thousand years.

So the ideal would be to fission uranium then thorium then fusion.

No, the future of civilisation lies in powering down. 200 years ago, EVERYTHING was powered by renewables, fossil fuels hadn't been discovered yet..... Today we are much smarter than then, and 90% of all the energy we consume is wasted on trivial crap nobody needs.

I recently saw plans for a DIRIGIBLE using HELIUM instead of HYDROGEN. It could take off and land anywhere, and used much much less energy to travel, and could travel about 120 miles per hour. The use of DC power instead of AC would greatly reduce our footprint too, and well insulated homes or the ability to get away from the SEVENTY TWO DEGREE mentality and accept temperatures from 62 to 83 degrees (I call it the 21 degree mentality) will reduce consumption tremendously. I believe it is at least 2% reduction for every degree change.

Before 200 years ago most of our lifestyle was based on slavery, both people and animals plus hunting to near extinction of whales for their oils and many other species. Hard work was backbreaking, most people lived on subsistence levels.

Fossil power has allowed the world population to increase 7 fold and for the richer countries to have about 15 to 30 times more energy. Overall world energy use is up 28 fold but it isn't evenly spread around at 4 times for everybody, so many are stuck at the same level as before.

There simply isn't enough biomass to go back to 200 years ago with 7x the population unless we mostly die off.

Once fossil fuels go and the AGW works its way along we get to live in a very different world.

this is the truth we don't want to see.

And this sounds like for the PJM interchange that we would also decommission all nuclear plants by that time. If we keep a bit of nuclear in the mix and really focus on energy efficiency, then this is even easier for us to do. One thing is for sure, we need leadership to force the utilities to do this and to stop adding non renewable capacity. Why add a coal or even natural gas fired plant which is justified by a 30 year life span if we are going to be close to 100% renewable in 20 years? Also, let's do a carbon tax so private enterprise will choose the renewable solution and we won't have to have government forcing us to do this.

Doing a carbon tax, is the same as government forcing private enterprise towards renewable solutions. Taxes are government tools, used to collect funds for government functions, and they could be used to punish companies and individuals, and what you're suggesting is using taxation for punishment.

The Government collects taxes to pay the cost of Government services. How and from whom these taxes are collected necessarily has policy implications. Collecting taxes on cigaretts for instance discourages smoking. Collecting taxes on capital gains arguably discourages investment. And, collecting taxes on CO2 producing industries will discourage inefficient use of resources and pollution of the environment. So, what would you prefer to discourage, investment or pollution?

punitive taxation.

Government needs taxes and fees in order to fund "necessary" spending.

Collecting taxes on capital gains, does not "arguably" discourage investment; it "for certain", discourage investment.

Collecting taxes on smoking might discourage "some" from smoking, but, has there really been a reduction in the total number of people smoking? Raising taxes on smokers, just makes their habit a lot more expensive. If they really want to do something about smoking, then government should forbid smoking via laws, but, it's still legal to do so, so, why should it be punished? Driving causes many thousands of lives to be lost on a yearly basis, and it also causes many thousands (perhaps millions) of injuries on a yearly basis, thereby making driving a very expensive and deadly proposition. So, why not ban driving, or discourage it by raising the price of gas to "punishment" type levels, like they did with smoking?

CO2 is a byproduct of driving and other energy uses. Raising taxes on oil or CO2 producing fuels, creates a burden for personal and business use, which translates to a big burden to the economy, which means that, if people and businesses have to spend more on fuel, there will be less personal and business funds to spend elsewhere in the economy, which will and has, caused many businesses to close shop and millions of people to lose jobs.

The problem with democrats/liberals is that, they don't understand repercussions. In physics, we understand that, to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In economics, every action creates repercussions that reverberate throughout the economy. Punishment economics not only hurts people and businesses with higher prices, but it also sends many of those businesses to foreign lands, which means millions of jobs lost. We are witnessing those repercussions on a daily basis, and we are digging an even deeper hole with higher taxation (or punishment taxation) and with the massive number of regulations, many of which are also intended as punitive actions against the sectors which democrats deem "out of line".

Every one of your hypotheses are based on flawed assumptions. The current adaptation to circumstances has built in benefits to BIG PHARMA, BIG AGRICULTURE, BIG OIL, BIG INSURANCE and BIG FINANCE by way of tax incentives and subsidies that HIDE the TRUE COST of things. The 9 billion dollars in subsidies to the oil companies LAST YEAR ALONE...could better have been spent developing renewable energy, and people would have reduced their travel because of the high HONEST cost of gasoline. There could easily be REBATES to people for temporary needs to use existing technology to get back and forth to work, but many people would find ways to BANK THE REBATES and REDUCE THEIR USE (carpools, work at home, four day work weeks are just a few adaptations that become WIN/WIN)

adornoe, I am sure you are used to thinking yourself superior intellectually to bleeding hearts, but I WAS ONE OF YOU until I started doing RESEARCH that shows FOLLOWING THE MONEY has to be TRANSPARENT, and using taxes to support corporations at the expense of individuals leads to TRICKLE UP, not TRICKLE DOWN. I can go on forever about how corporations WRITE THE REGULATIONS they later ***** about...and they are written to make it harder for smaller companies to compete with their teams of lawyers and accountants.

1. 4.5B of those "subsidies" didn't go to Big Oil, they went to find the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program (LIHEAP). This provides discounted heating and cooling to low income families.
2. Only 1.5% of Big Oil are owned by executive big wigs, the other 98.5% are owned by the public through personal brokerage accounts, mutual funds and pension funds. The money is not "trickling up".
3. $1B of the Big Oil subsidies go to farmers as a fuel tax exemption because their equipment doesn't use the roads (which the tax goes to pay for).
4. Part of the Big Oil subsidies are tax credits for manufacturing in the US, which provides an incentive for those companies not to move their operations overseas. The subsidies not only apply to oil companies but any US corporations (including Microsoft and Apple). The subsidies result in a direct positive effect on the US economy and jobs.
5. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to work from home, or carpool (think construction workers, teachers, fire fighters, police, retail service staff, maintenance jobs, cleaners, delivery staff etc).

So it is important to first understand what those $9B in subsidies are, and why they can't just be dropped and spent on renewal programs instead. Just look at what happened with Solyndra, a $850M loss to the taxpayers, who funded this experiment in green technology.

That said, I am not a raging Republican, and have no affiliation to the oil industry. I do agree that we need to actively invest in renewable energy sources but I think there are better ways to go about it, then cutting these subsidies.

Did you stop to consider the current US military budget ($680B in 2011)? That's 2 orders of magnitude more money than any subsidies. Why not cut this budget, or better yet eliminate it entirely (as in the case of Costa Rica)?

Small, remote towns in Alaska have little hope of affording the means to generate power by renewable sources, and therefore, must pay a penalty (tax) for the inability - thus being twice fined - first, by extremely high-cost high fossil fuel generation, then by the government's if you don't make it, you still pay for it (renewable-source power generated elsewhere). The State of Alaska helps in some areas, where wind is reliable, with funding that will never be repaid because of economies of scale. Maybe we should be studying the efficiencies of igloos and sod houses. . .

The LAND OF THE THE MIDNIGHT SUN I deduce from you statement is in the dark 24/7, so solar is out.

Let's face it..... the only reason ANYONE can live in Alaska is because of fossil fuels. With fossil fuels, you can do ANYTHING....

Americans are used to CONTROLLING their environment rather than ADAPTING or TEMPERING MICRO-ENVIRONMENTS. With fossil fuels you can only do anything until the fuel runs out or you choke on the byproducts.

A: Mostly because of oil. If we don't need it, we can give Alaska back to the natives, and they can return to the neolithic lifestyle they love so much.

n/t

The native Alaskans have incredible mechanical abilities. They could keep engines running with duct tape and baling wire during blizzards. Do NOT degrade their abilities. They also managed a lifestyle with CACHES of food and supplies stored in advance that relied on interdependence for their survival. Their metabolism is able to thrive on a life with few vegetables and fruits where we would likely starve.

If you knew anything about STONE TOOL CULTURES, you would have more respect for their tremendous skills. Surgeons today are reverting to the stone age by using OBSIDIAN BLADES that are many times sharper than METAL BLADES.

P.S. I lived in Alaska many years ago and studied anthropology too. My comments are not just pulled out of thin air.

I lived in Fairbanks in 1954-1957, and remember the adaptations of tunnels and basements, but also remember the SOLAR ENERGY during the summer months was awesome! 20 hours of sunlight a day...yeah it was dark for the winter months, but transferring some of that power means storage of summer surplus, not total lack of renewable energy. You need to adapt to the situation, and perhaps a reduction or rebate for energy would be needed, but don't just complain...come up with solutions.

No, a C Tax is an incentive.. we have a C Tax in Australia, and I NEVER PAY any of it.

...and had we bothered to build the infrastructure, we could, today, power the USA at any rate, solely from that source.

Instead, our 'leaders' have chosen to believe that our ancient standard of 'scarce' resources, imbedded in our economic and political realities, still apply in a universe of abundance..and abundant power is abundance in everything, given the tiny fraction of even the Earth's tiny fraction of the Solar System's resources we bother to include in our calculations.

Not only is Earth NOT the sole source for resources we have available, but it is the LEAST of such resources.

We did not pursue space-based solar 35 years ago because compared with other generation methods (coal, oil, gas, nuclear)--none of which paid their full ecological costs, SPS appeared more expensive. But when the true costs of obtaining, processing and waste disposal of 'burnable' fuels is calculated, SPS is on par or cheaper as well as a climate-friendly source for energy.

We are as ants, struggling for control of a crumb amidst an immense warehouse full of bread. Too focused on our belief to bother checking reality.

...and even Mr. Obama did not re-install the solar collectors Reagan took off...

I have to put something here to get it to post...

The economics of space based solar is silly because it is so expensive to get anything into space, and it uses fossil fuels and the most expensive technology man has produced.

It is actually far cheaper to microwave energy from the ground to space than the reverse by a very long shot even though the insolation up there is much better.

Every solar panel has an embedded footprint of energy cost that gets paid back when the panel is used. If a panel lasts 25 years, the first few years are for payback, the rest is the bonus.

Now add the rocket and fuel energy into the cost of getting the panels up there and the payback is long after the panel is dead, its a negative payback.

Only in lala land where everything is free are these schemes interesting.

still, the "free" energy won't do anything but reduce pollution. Believe me the political and business organizations will make sure that everyone pays more and more money for the 'free green' energy, as a means to retain control over the people and keep them focused on their day to day minutiae and little job and money worries instead of upon larger matters, like who's running things.

There are three SALVATION INNOVATIONS that I hope will prove you wrong. The internet, 3D printing and renewable energy. The thing that concerns me is that we may end up paying outrageous amounts for AIR and WATER and FOOD if the power that be continue to pollute the environment. Energy alone is not enough. We need SELF-SUFFICIENCY as much as possible. If we don't fight to get it, we will be doomed to be servants to the corporations and plutocrats.

It sounds nice to hear all this, but who exactly will be paying for these million plus power plants and billions of home units? Oh right, me again.

The study says the barriers are primarily social and political, not technological or even economic. I'm calling shenanigans. I get my power from the grid because I can't get it any cheaper elsewhere (I've researched other sources too). The grid is running primarily off of fossil fuels. That's cheapest, and I can't afford more.
The barrier is cost, plain and simple. And if you political types run up the cost of gas and electric by taxing it I swear to God I'll start voting for republicans.

And I'm not cutting back on usage, you go be Amish if you want but leave me alone.

Two things you may have missed. First, solar is on track to be the cheapest source of electricity. In Hawaii, it already is (even unsubsidized). In the southwest US, solar will be the cheapest electricity, at the retail level, by 2016 even without subsidies.

Second, if the full environmental cost of fossil fuel (the open pit mining, franking, ground water contamination, air pollution, global warming) was included in your electric bill rather than just dumped on your fellow citizens, you would be screaming for renewable power because its true cost is so much less.

There has not been a single study that proves that, the "renewable" resources are cheaper than the "naturally occurring" resources we have now, like oil/natural gas/coal, which are, today easily accessible and quite cheap to access and harness.

The natural gas that comes from CHENEY's REGULATION FREE FRACKING is not so cheap when you realize the entire water supply of the country is in jeopardy...but of course the PLUTOCRATS will happily sell you WATER at prices that rival OIL when it is over. They don't care about the consequences of their actions...they just want next quarter's profits to be higher. They know that they will be able to make a profit at the expense of the rest of us no matter how much they destroy things. WELL, that is not quite true...eventually they will mess things up so badly that earth will need to start over with a round of consequences that will make the earth uninhabitable for more than a few living in bunkers deep underground.

Germany boasts about it renewables, but all that solar 25GW of capacity produces about the same no of kWh as just 3GW of base load power plants at a cost well past $130B for the first 17GW (2GW actual avg power output). That works out as $65/W for avg capacity.

Meanwhile coal and gas plants are closer to $2/W and nuclear about $5W for base load power.

Also German wind plus solar produces power all over the place, it could be anywhere between 2GW to 30GW hour by hour day to day, which of course is covered by gas plants or spare hydro.

As Germany shuts down those 17 nuclear power plants it replaces them with new coal and gas plants thanks to their Greens.

The German people pay the highest energy prices, but their manufacturers don't, they pay only at coal prices.

Also since the world runs on 15000GW of thermal power equiv to about 5000GWe, and China only makes about 17GW of new nameplate solar capacity enough to replace 3GWe power plants each year, we have a problem Houston. And that doesn't even get us into rare materials like indium for the front wiring.

And me. And everyone else. BFD.

Think about it for a moment. Existing plants wear out and have to be replaced. So, replace them with renewables.

The price of electricity (LCOE) is calculated assuming a 20 year payoff. Wind farms continue to produce electricity for 10 or more years past the payoff. Solar panels keep on producing for another 10, 20, 30, ? years. All of that is almost free electricity.

After coal, gas and nuclear plants are paid off they continue to incur fuel costs.

Over time our electricity will get cheaper and cheaper.

n/t

Coal and gas plants use fuel that is cheap right now but those don't cover their external costs to the environment as in CO2 plus the toxic content of coal fly ash and the known deaths from coal emissions.

Nuclear fuel costs are inconsequential to nuclear power, uranium prices could go up 10 fold and would not have much effect and nuclear has no CO2 emissions (save construction).

If we used thorium, a $100k ball of metal will produce about $B worth of energy and various valuable isotopes assuming 11c/kWh.

Over time electricity will get more expensive, always has always will, and with out nuclear even more so, see Germany and Denmark.

Why are you so adamant about not cutting back on usage? Are you insisting on the right to WASTE? or do you want to continue to subsidize the OIL, AGRICULTURE and PHARMACEUTICAL companies? The TRUE COST of your existing energy is much higher than you are currently paying...they have HIDDEN SUBSIDIES that make you think you are paying less than you are. The 9 BILLION dollars in tax incentives to the oil companies last year still didn't reduce your cost at the pump as much as they should, but that same money spent on reducing dependence on oil and gas would have had much better results IMO.

but, when it comes to "renewable", why are not fossil fuels also considered "renewable"? It makes no sense. The only reason would be that, it's all mostly about an agenda from the environmentalists and the "liberal" ideology which seeks to enslave the world.

Most of the fossil fuel we consume today was formed during two epochs of extreme global warming 90 and 150 million years ago. So yes, if you're willing to wait millions of years, they are "renewable."

most of that fuel is created below ground and with the help of the underground forces, which forces are also moving the tectonic plates as we speak, and creating volcanoes, and changing the weather as we speak, for the short and long terms.

But, "fossil" fuels may be a misnomer, since, there are indications that, the planet creates that fuel without there having to be dead life, or organic, material available. Science has discovered methane and other "fuel" type material on other planets, so, what created that up there? There are no cows or dead organisms out there that we know of.

Oil and natural gas may be as plentiful today as they have always been, and they many continue to be "manufactured" by the natural forces, no matter what we do, and no matter how much organic material is available on the ground. There is much more organic material being deposited on the ground than ever in the history of the planet, but, that's not to say that we need to wait 100 or 200 million years before we get to use the "energy" created from that dead material.

Boy, I never pegged you as someone who believed in abiogenic generation of fossil fuels. Just further evidence of your disconnection from reality.

I will allow that methane can be produced by non-organic processes but that's not common on Earth.

As far as "much more organic material being deposited ... than ever in the history of the planet", you must be kidding.

where, there is more plant and animal life than ever before in earth's history, which means that, there will be a correspondingly equal amount of dead material being deposited. Dinosaurs might have been huge, but, the totality of life on earth now, is much bigger than in prior epochs.

But, petroleum or oil, may not have depended on dead organic material to be created.

"Everybody seems to believe in Hubbert's Peak Oil Theory. Why do you believe in this theory? Within this article I present fairly convincing evidence that Peak Oil is a theory based on a false premise - that oil is a finite resource."

"The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time." Sir Fred Hoyle FRS 1982.

"The general concept of petroleum formation by biogenic mechanisms has been firmly entrenched for a long time, but there has been no accumulation of convincing experimental evidence in support of this belief." -- Charles E. Melton and A.A. Giardini, 1983"

Peak Oil, just like the junk of global warming, are very flawed theories, and not provable in any real scientific manner.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.353778-Peak-Oil-is-a-false-hypothesis-as-oil-is-not-a-finite-resource

I checked your link, 2nd para

"I've had a conspiracy theory" and so it goes, you are part of the fringe that believes that all science that doesn't fit your world view is nonsense, there is no arguing with that.

Sir Fred Hoyle was a great man in his time but he also didn't believe in the big bang even though he named that as an insult to the new idea. He was wrong though, the science is well done on that.

Issac Newton was an alchemist too, but we set that issue aside because the rest of his work still stands today.

You know if you cook animals in their own fat, you can render them into something, maybe oil.

All fossil fuels are solar power converted to life, that died, got buried, got cooked etc all over hundreds of millions of years. Coal is dead trees from over 200M years. Then white fungus evolved to allow trees to rot, there is no new coal since then.

We started using fossil fuels in anger 200 years ago about the same same as CO2 started rising, they have gone hand in hand.

We will use up the easy fossil fuels in a total of 250 years that took many hundreds of millions of years to produce, no amount of wishful thinking can change that. We need energy sources that are more energy dense than fossil that can last for thousands of year, only nuclear can do that.

Its not just the wait time, its the production rate, the earth doesn't produce fossil fuel fast enough to be of any consequence, it needs to be a million times faster, and that has to do with the inefficiency of solar to plant at 1%.

Also since white fungus evolved, no new coal in 200M years either, trees rot and go back into the carbon cycle.

Still we have plenty of fire ice or methane clathrates at the bottom of the oceans and tundra, shame we can't switch to nuclear instead.

And remember, we can never hope to achieve energy independence with solar power because ALL of our sunlight is imported and there never will be ANY domestic sources. So, "Drill baby drill!"

the article, but, be prepared to use half your earnings (or the majority of your government handouts), to pay for them, because, it's going to be a very expensive proposition.

But, energy independence for the U.S. can EASILY be attained. All we need to do is to, like you said, "drill, baby, drill", and that would be to drill for oil and coal and natural gas. The U.S. has enough natural resources underground to makes us energy independent for 100 - 200 years. But, the madness that comes from the government regulations, don't allow us to gain that independence. We could have been energy independent 10 or 20 years ago. Now, we are dependent upon foreign energy sources from countries which hate us, and which take a lot of our wealth away with the cost of that oil, and who also are known to not care about polluting the environment. It's a hypocritical set of regulations which have us offshoring our energy requirements. The hypocrisy is what leads many to believe that, the problem is not about protecting the environment, but about having the government take over more control over our lives through control of the resources we all need so much.

Even if we can be energy independent today, WHY do it that way? Those hydrocarbons can be better used than burning them up! Also, your logic would say that if the rest of the world is willing to use up their resources when prices are low, we should let them use theirs now, and save ours until prices are higher. PLUS we can do a better job of making sure that extraction won't have unintended consequences if we are patient!

Until you realize that the people who write those accursed REGULATIONS you hate so much are the CORPORATIONS and LOBBYISTS (for their own benefit), you will be a SUCKER for the GOP LIES. adornoe, if you are really concerned about reducing regulations and energy independence get on the bandwagon for low cost renewable energy and you will find that REGULATIONS will be reduced when lives are not threatened by irresponsible corporations.

(To be clear, that's in response to z2217's "Independence" post)

Think about it...

energy that pollutes is more costly than energy that doesn't pollute.

There are people who won't understand the humor and use you as a source to "PROVE" that it is okay to drill and frack up our water supply.

The study cited suggests that the renewable generation be 'oversized' wrt the load because that minimizes storage requirements - all well and good. But if we make this reasonable design choice, it would seem to open up an opportunity for adding useful, but discretionary loads to the grid that could make use of the excess generation that will be available most of the time, but that can be shut down when demand is high and production is low. In particular, desalination plants in the southwest (essentially California) could usefully absorb excess generation most of the time, but go off-line during peak demand / minimum production conditions. The fresh water produced might then be 'wheeled' via existing irrigation infrastructure to arid inland areas (Colorado, Nevada, Arizona) where, in turn, large amounts of solar generation might be sited on available federal lands and the generated power sent west...

Another use for the extra energy from overcapacity would be to use the power to extract CO2 from the atmosphere (or the ocean). It would be a small but positive use of the energy.

Extracting CO2 from the air is a very energy expensive idea, forget it. Only plants and trees can do that without any tech and only very slowly.

If adding O2 to C releases energy (by splitting the CC or HC bonds), then splitting the CO2 back into C and O2 will need more power than was generated. That is an oxymoron, it leads to perpetual machines.

Sequestering CO2 from coal or gas plants is also difficult, since combustion gives CO2 that is 3.5 times heavier and needs more volume, where to put it back, and why would it stay there. If it ever leaked out of a store, it would kill all life around, see "Volcano CO2 kills in Africa" Lake Nyos.

Best way to look at this study, IMO, is that it gives us a 'worst case' answer. It tells us that we can build an almost fossil fuel free grid using technology we have and it would be affordable.

Further inventions and smart ideas will work to make it cheaper.

For example, GE is working on wind turbine blades which consist of lightweight metal frames covered with fabric. They are predicting a 25% to 40% decrease in blade cost. That brings the cost of wind electricity down from what the study uses.

Dispatchable loads, as you suggest, can be another way to lower costs.

We now know the worst. We know the cost of dealing with long windless, Sunless stretches and we know it's a price we can tolerate.

Now we work to make things sweeter....

As said to a friend who reads this site...
I looked at the article and it indeed seems to ignore realities, like assuming existence of...

13,600 5-MW offshore wind turbines
38,000 3-MW wind turbines
No more than 72 hours worth of distributed hydrogen storage

Reading data sheets for windmills reveals they demand about 700 tons of resources per MW peak (333kW average). Those materials must be processed via fossil fuels -- each 1000 cubic meter foundation for a 5MW Siemens windmill requires gas/oil fired kilning of limestone, mining & crushing & transporting of same; mining, crushing & transport of aggregate to make concrete;

Mining transporting & forging iron, plus coal to make steel at the rate of about 100 tons per 333kW -- steel requires coal to make coke, etc. and at the rate of >4 tons of coal per ton of steel; a 5MW Siemens tower weighs 400 tons;

Then the generator, convertor, transmission lines and roads must be made& laid -- all requiring fossil fuels and expensive materials, like rare earths, now sourced from overseas;

Finally, each windmill operates only within a certain windspeed ranger, so not only do wind 'farms' consume land at great rates, they waste power and miss power opportunities when winds are too slow or too fast -- this cost is usually ignored by promoters.

Imagine Sandy's effect on the large offshore wind installs assumed in this piece. Insurance cost? Maintenance & repair cost? Cost of outage? Cost of maritime collisions -- the Cost Guard estimates that just the planned wind farm off MA will experience 1.23 vessel collisions per year.

The wind promoters follow subsidies, not environmental concerns, so this
article is massively off the mark.

As for solar 'farms' like Ivanpah, we in the Sierra Club opposed that, because it's also gas fired -- yes, to keep the salt warm and selling power, they must have a gas line out into the desert and so emit even more GHGs than their thermal inefficiency and transmission losses cause. Look at the Ivanpah photo -- sun is setting, gas is on!

All the while any windmills are becalmed or feathered, all the while solar farms are burning gas, nukes just keep on delivering, 24/7, at >90% capacity. And they even do it with much less construction emissions than wind. The 'renewables' hawkers get FIT, but don't seem to get "power density".

Too many folks are tricked by 'green' promoters aiming to get taxpayer $
via various subsidies. We can choose to be careful & think, or to be suckers!
--
Dr. A. Cannara
650-400-3071

Imagine Sandy's effect on the large offshore wind installs assumed in this piece.

According to reports I've seen Sandy caused little or no damage to the existing wind turbines which it's path crossed. I don't think hurricanes are an issue for wind turbines although tornadoes might be a different story.

Yes, wind turbines require loads of energy to me made and erected, but a well sited turbine returns ALL the energy involved in its manufacture in about six months.....

And so would nuclear by a large margin, about 10x for same MW produced. Add in 4 time life advantage and add in fossil fuel support to wind and you have 40x advantage and the land footprint is about 1000 times better.

See "metal and concrete inputs Petroski"

Wind power is really indirect solar power, and wind and solar overall produce avg power close to only 2W/sq m, sometimes much more, but mostly zero.

See "without the hot air", this free book by Dr David MacKay compares all energy sources in depth with some sobering conclusions for the UK.

But throwing the baby out with dirty water isn't the answer either. WE KNOW oil and gas pollutes and is not renewable in our lifetimes. Thousands of years ago COOLING TOWERS were low tech solutions. Solar COLLECTORS for hot water and HEAT EXCHANGERS for cooling are other examples. DC power is much safer than AC power. PHOTOSYNTHESIS could be harnessed or ALGAE POWERED fuel. All of these make more sense than continuing to waste oil and gas reserves to promote people driving around long distances to "go to work" at jobs that don't need to be done in the first place. REDUCE CONSUMPTION first!

The low tech stuff is good in some situations but it is mostly low energy value.

Solar water heat, heat pumps are good too as those dramatically reduce electrical power use, perhaps 3 fold.

Algae farming is going to be the next big thing right after corn ethanol, big net negative energy, it is just a form of solar power with too much high tech for too little power output. Liquid fuels can also be produced by nuclear power esp when you go to very high temps, split water directly and convert the hydrogen to Ammonia, Methanol, DME etc, far more efficient and not much land needed. But they would need some carbon feed stock.

There is a report "metal and concrete inputs Petroski" that compares steel and concrete use of wind vs nuclear. Wind uses about 10x the concrete and steel of nuclear. And those turbines face real wear and tear and have 15 year rated lives while nuclear plants may run up to 60 years. That would make the materials advantage 40 fold and they are base load. Add the fossil backup to wind and the advantage increases further.

Just for the illustration see images "toronto nuclear plant" at Pickering.

You can plainly see 1 isolated wind turbine that towers over the nuclear plant yet produces peak 1.8MW at 18% capacity factor while each of those 6 working reactors can produce 1GW,

If you replaced those reactors, I think you would need well over 20,000 times more turbines and a vast area of land, and obviously far more steel and concrete.

Question is the Sierra Club now fully on board with nuclear, or just some?

"The main barriers to the transition, they concluded, are primarily social and political, not technological or even economic.

That means too many of the populace are refusing to bow to things lik ethe FORCED Smart Grid/Smart Meter intiatives because they know that all this talk about renewable & sustainable living is NOT about renewable energy and sustainable living but is instead about the elite few using the power of government and the power of gult to get the masses to hand over every liberty, right and freedom that was afforded to us by our Constituition.

Striving to end dependence on fosil fuels is a nobel and worth whiel effort but NOT if its being managted/lead by those who work under the control of government and the powerful. Everything must be fully open and nothing can be kepty from the pybcli because government CAN NOT BE TRUSTED.

We have no control (not even the power to avoid paying corporations who sell us necessities) over what corporations do, but we do have the power of the VOTE to control government if corporations are not permitted to control the process through bribes and lobbyists who write regulations that are self-serving.

In celebration, I turned on every light in my house, started the car, lawnmower, leaf blower, dishwasher, fans, AC, space heaters.

the deep fryer. y'know, for your taters.

Mr. Neider talks about 99.9% reliability from renewables, but the standard today in first world countries is something like 99.99% or even 99.999%. A standard of 99.9% is almost 9 hours of power outage per year. That may not sound like much, but many large scale industries can't tolerate anything but the briefest interruptions. It shuts down industrial processes which can take days to restore, and creates other problems starting up again. And how many residential customers will put up with nine hours of power outage a year? Outside of natural disasters (which will still strike the power grid whether we use renewables or not), how many years have you seen a total of nine hours of outages?

Mr. Neider points out a study that says we can provide backup with a huge system of fossil fuel plants and that in the study "Over four years, generation from fossil fuels would have been needed only five times in summer months, at only about one-third of the total system generation capacity. That fossil fuel capacity would be met by natural gas."

Oh, really? And who's going to build and maintain natural gas plants equivalent to 1/3 of our total generating capacity? That's a HUGE investment, roughly equivalent to 1/3 the cost of all the renewable energy on Mr. Neider's shopping list. It's probably in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars price range. Nobody's going to finance that. We'll have to maintain today's natural gas plants and then replace them as they grow old, even as they sit idle 99.9% of the time. Then you must also have massive reserves of natural gas on standby for use at a moment's notice, which also costs money.

Storage is the single biggest issue blocking renewables today, and Mr. Neider only gives it a handwave ("We know that storage is advancing rapidly, and will enable very high penetration rates of renewables in the coming decades."). Where are the details? Until we figure out cost-effective storage, the more we depend on renewables the more expensive maintaining rarely-used backup fossil fuel plants becomes until it kills the whole deal. We see that today. Renewable energy above a 20% mix starts to become more expensive instead of cheaper because you have to maintain more idle fossil fuel plants as backup (see http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eper_10.htm ).

"And who's going to build and maintain natural gas plants equivalent to 1/3 of our total generating capacity?"

They're pretty much already built. First half of 2012 we got 31% of our total electricity from natural gas.

They'll be maintained the same way that we now maintain gas peaker plants that we use only a few hours each year. With people.

Over time we'll probably develop better/cheaper storage and phase out that last little bit of fossil fuel.

Storage? Check out Ambri's liquid metal battery. It's a very interesting technology that seems to be making its way to the grid and should provide very inexpensive storage.

99.9% reliable means that, on average, .01% of production capacity will be offline at any given time. You've calculated as if each customer would be getting power from a single production facility.

"4.25 million 4-kW (residential) rooftop solar systems"

Data was from the largest commercial grid in the world. One fifth of the US. 60 million people.

Figure four people per household. 15 million houses. One out of every 3.5 houses with solar panels. That sound doable?

we also need to interconnect this households with a good wire infrastructure so any leftover power would move into the grid to be used where needed.

If this is so great why has 75% of the companies Obama gave Millions too filed for banckrupcy>/ Every month they come out with a big and better not thinking right now is the time to invest in that.

Suggest for cost of this power if your in your 50's or 60's you won't live long enough for the return on your investment. natural gas has gotten really cheap. Pay backs of 35 years are not a good investment.

If this is so great why has [sic] 75% of the companies Obama gave Millions too filed for banckrupcy [sic]

Do you have a cite for that 75% figure? Seems to me from what I've heard the rate is less than 10%.

For solar, almost all the help Obama gave to solar has been for nothing because China has every advantage, cheaper coal power, cheaper labor, poor environment rules, supportive gov and use of automation and a few more things too boot.

One of those solar companies was in my town, it didn't even want the money since they always planned on relocating to China. It was pushed in their face so they took it from the state, when they moved as they said they would it was lost.

The non solar may have done better, but the battery money for another company near me A123 has also just gone. China again, same as above.

I blame Chinese slave labour..

Find the way to stop your own footprint as much as possible hard but doable!!! Just gotta get the head right. We can get all of these money grabbers off our backs with a little outside the BOX thinking.

Why do renewables boosters go through such contortions to avoid considering the advantages of nuclear power? Of course you COULD run a modern industrial society on 100 percent renewables, but it doesn't make any economic sense. Studies consistently demonstrate that above a 20-30% contribution the unit-cost of renewables escalates due to the construction of extra units that will be producing wasted power when production exceeds demand. Combined with the extra costs of storage, which can never be as cheap as production from plants which can adjust output in response to demand unless they and all their supporting infrastructure and grid connections are free and the storage is 100% efficient , the required overbuild of alternatives significantly raises required investments.

Generation three nuclear plants are being build now all around the world and will produce energy reliably at a cost lower than wind (considering winds' required overbuild) and way less than solar is ever likely to cost. Small modular reactors are in advanced stages of development along with breeder designs that will simultaneously solve the problems of waste disposal and future fuel shortages. Thorium reactors will be on the scene too in a decade, and will be able to provide a reliable and cheap source of power for millenia to come.

Build more wind and solar now, but the bulk of the investment should be directed down the nuclear path if we are to make the deep cuts in CO2 which are necessary to stop anthropogenic climate change.

Dr David MacKay pretty much says the same thing in his book "without the hot air" where he analyses every imaginable power source with the help of hundreds of scientists. He lets people draw their own conclusion though for the UK perspective. Solar and wind, tidal, algae, all are hopeless for the energy demands of small densely populated countries.

We only have to look at Germany and Denmark to see how bad these policies can get and see France for all the CO2 they didn't produce. Germany is replacing 17GW of nuclear with a similar amount of new coal and gas plants. German new CO2 emissions will now cancel out all the efforts of the UK and others to reduce theirs.

Great article, as usual from Chris, but one caveat is that including geothermal based on the amount of heat in the earth is naive. As he well knows, what matters is not gross amount of energy available, but EROI -- energy return on energy invested. EROI on geothermal remains extremely uncertain -- even the most favored locations (ie The Geysers) have long-term EROI's that may not be workable, that is >3.
As for the usual nuclear ranting, its all just moonshine. The current generation of nuclear reactors have an unknown but small EROI, and we still haven't figured out what to do with the wastes, or who will pay for the occasional catastrophic accident. Next generation reactors are just now being built, and as learned from the current generation, the up-front claims turn out to be wildly optimistic. Plus Thorium and Uranium are finite resources. Solar and wind are now in operation, and costs and EROI figures are based on real experience. Ten years from now we may have similar numbers for 3rd generation nuclear reactors, but until then, and until underground waste repositories are up and running, projections about nuclear are just fantasy-land.

VERY IMPORTANT to note the comment at the end of the story,

"The authors also point out that at 90 percent penetration, there was no solar in the system. Only when the penetration of renewables was increased to 99.9 percent did the solar portion rise to around 30 GW..."

In other words, the study in question shows that WIND energy is almost cost-competitive with natural gas and nuclear fission, but solar energy is not cost-competitive now and is not expected to be cost-competitive by year 2030. I attended a conference by the leaders in USA solar energy companies and another conference by the leaders in USA nuclear energy this year. The most optimistic statements by the CEOs of solar energy companies (solar thermal generation, which is projected to be more cost-effective than photovoltaics) put the current cost of solar energy at 3x the cost of wind or natural gas or nuclear power, and projected that it might come down to 2x the cost in another decade.

So the study basically says we can derive most of our electricity in North America from 14,000 offshore wind turbines and 38,000 onshore wind turbines, IF the American public switches to running more than half of the cars on the road to battery-powered electric vehicles (by plugging 50 million electric vehicles into a vast smart grid you can achieve the energy storage scale needed to balance wind fluctuations.) The wind turbines would be the very large 5 megawatt wind turbines (400 feet tall). It is not clear at this point what would induce 50% of Americans to buy an electric car in the next 20 years but it seems likely that the price of gasoline would have to go much higher. At best this projection of energy storage is very optimistic.

Also consider the environmental impact of 52,000 wind turbines 400 feet tall. This is not a small impact on the American landscape. In my opinion, this would in fact be an improvement over the carbon-dioxide induced climate changes that we are causing now with our coal and natural gas providing 70% of our electricity. but when the American public is given a visual impression of the environmental effects of the 52,000 wind turbines vs the 200 nuclear power plants that could accomplish the same thing (at equivalent or lower cost, since nuclear plants will not require the massive energy storage system)-- I think Americans would choose the smaller environmental footprint of the nuclear plants rather than the wind turbines. Just ask the good folks of Nantucket... the Cape Wind project there was supposed to begin building ten years ago... but the project is still tied up by legal challenges from local environmental groups. Does that sound familiar, Diablo Canyon?

Why does no one point that out? Good bye recession.

The first power grid was fully subsidised by tax payers so why shouldn't the second be. Private industry hasn't kept up our current one so they've shown themselves deficient to this task already.

That is called a make work program, dig ditches and fill them back up.

It would be far better to have a rational energy policy and start building nuclear power to offset the CO2 industry and worry about employment later.

The article indeed seems to ignore realities, like assuming existence of...

13,600 5-MW offshore wind turbines
38,000 3-MW wind turbines
No more than 72 hours worth of distributed hydrogen storage

Reading data sheets for windmills reveals they demand about 700 tons of resources per MW peak (333kW average). Those materials must be processed via fossil fuels -- each 1000 cubic meter foundation for a 5MW Siemens windmill requires gas/oil fired kilning of limestone, mining & crushing & transporting of same; mining, crushing & transport of aggregate to make concrete.

Mining transporting & forging iron, plus coal to make steel at the rate of about 100 tons per 333kW -- steel requires coal to make coke, etc. and at the rate of 1-4 tons of coal per ton of steel (reduced by scrap use). A 5MW Siemens tower weighs 400 tons;

Then the generator, convertor, transmission lines and roads must be made& laid -- all requiring fossil fuels and expensive materials, like rare earths, now sourced from overseas;

Finally, each windmill operates only within a certain windspeed range, so not only do wind 'farms' consume land at great rates, they waste power and miss power opportunities when winds are too slow or too fast -- this cost is usually ignored by promoters.

Imagine Sandy's effect on the large offshore wind installs assumed in this piece. Insurance cost? Maintenance & repair cost? Cost of outage? Cost of maritime collisions -- the Coast Guard estimates that just the planned wind farm off MA will experience 1.23 vessel collisions per year.

The wind promoters follow subsidies, not environmental concerns, so this article is off the mark.

As for solar 'farms' like Ivanpah, we in the Sierra Club opposed that, because it's also gas fired -- yes, to keep the salt warm and selling power, they must have a gas line out into the desert and so emit even more GHGs than their thermal inefficiency and transmission losses cause.

All the while the windmills are becalmed or feathered, all the while the solar farms are burning gas, local solar delivers peak needs, while nuclear just keeps on delivering, 24/7, at >90% capacity. And they even do it with much less construction emissions than wind.

Hi
Dr. AlexC with his post entitled 100% Renewables gives the real dirt on this possibility. The infrastructure costs for the windmills and panels are likely to be prohibitive on the real planet we live on at this time. Do read it if you want a stark reality check. It's just above or below this one I think; so new I couldn't reply to it.
TheAutomaticEarth site too contains essential imho "smart" stuff about energy and finance.
The bottom line is that we should prepare for less energy use, personally and socially, rather than fantasize continuance of our mega-habit.

Nothing can stop the march to renewables for energy security on our planet. Economic, commercial and availability indices all point towards this ultimate reality of energy security Any amount of vested interests on the part of political leaders, industrial cartels and powerful lobbies can only delay it maximum for another decade or so.
http://veekay-indiandreamsvsreality.blogspot.in/2012/12/energy-security-through-renewables-only.html

We have been passive solar since 1987. We built a Deck House with passive solar features. We estimate that because of the design for both heating and cooling, we have saved approximately 40% of utility costs for electric for the same square footage. We orientated the home for solar gain with low E argon filled windows added eaves of 2 ft and it protects the heat from enetring those windows in the summer, air locks for entering the home, placement of the garage on the north side of the house, also few indows on the north. We want to go active and be off the grid completely as our ultimate goal. Think of what we saved since 1987!

The Govenor of Virginia has just propsed an extra tax for those of us responsible enough to pay more for our vehicles to lower CARBON in the atmosphere and our dependence on fossile fuels. This is the most regressive tax ever proposed! Hopefully, he will come up with another way to pay for roads that is not going to charge HYBRID owners only.