Discussion on:

Coming soon: 100% renewable power

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.