[bootlegga]

DrCaleb wrote:

bootlegga wrote:

DrCaleb wrote:

Here's a good article on the Myth of Renewable Energy.

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/colu ... ble-energy

That article reads like a red herring - renewable energy is a joke because it uses non-renewable resources (like metal) to be used.

Wow, what a news flash! Good thing they enlightened me... [sarcasm off]

Seriously, just about everything mankind currently uses requires the use of non-renewable resources such as metal or rare earth elements. That is not, and never was the point of renewable energy plans - the point is to ensure we have energy to run our civilization after stuff like oil and coal runs out. And trust me, if oil runs out in the next decade or two, civilization as we know it will end.

It's not a red herring. It's pointing out a serious flaw in the current thinking that 100% 'renewable' is achievable. For example, you can't mine rare earth elements needed in windpower or solar without using hydrocarbons. There are no hybrid or electric only scrapers to remove overburden in ore mines!

I know the article is in a Nuclear Power biased publication, but I've always championed nuclear because it is able to be made avaliable 24/7 and can be increased on demand. You can't run steel mills in developing countries on solar and wind power, and that is exactly what developing countries need most of all is a steel industry.

The article is saying to use hydrocarbons where they are needed and can't be replaced by anything else, but to compensate the rest of our energy demands with 100% renewables is not possible just yet.

bootlegga wrote:

The thing about non-renewable energy is that someday it will run out, while renewable energy is available forever (assuming maintenance is provided and the earth doesn't explode) once you build the infrastructure. Someone with a solar panel may not get power from it today, but odds are they will tomorrow, or the next day or someday after that. Same goes for wind power.

The biggest problem with most renewable energy sources is that they cannot efficiently power transportation, which makes up somewhere between a quarter and a third of our energy needs. Still, if we put our minds to it, we'll find a way to make them work for us.

That's kind of like saying 'later today we'll run out of daylight' though isn't it? The definition of "non-renewable" is that they will eventually be used up. But todays' society is an 'on demand' one. When we turn on the light switch, we expect the lights to come on. We don't expect to wait for a couple days till the sun is bright enough to recharge the batteries. Especially this time of year in this hemisphere.

We will eventually find ways to substitute our energy needs with ones with better long term propects. The unfortunate part is that those concerend about the environment refuse to let the best substitutes be used in the mean time because of an irrational fear of the unknown. And governments also refuse to require all safety measures that are possible in order that the safety of the public and environment are held to the highest standard.

Well, the obvious clean, renewable energy that is 100% available 24/7 is fusion power - we just haven't figured out how to create a stable, self-sustaining reaction.

But sources such as wind and solar could be used to power any mills, mines, whatever. The trick is using it to crack hydrogen and then using the hydrogen to power a power plant capable of operating 24/7. They could even be used to power electric/hydrogen fuel cell cars and some transportation (like LRTs, electric buses, etc), but I doubt an electric-powered semi-truck is practical. If companies can build hybrid trains, why can't companies make hybrid ore scrapers?

And while fission power may be on-demand, it is just as effective at powering transportation as solar and wind is, which is to say, not very effective at all (short of the steps I suggested with wind/solar).

Honestly, I don't have a problem with using fission power instead of coal for power, but nuclear's biggest problem is PR - after Three Mile Island and Chernyobl, not very many people are keen on living within 50 kms of a nuke plant.

So 'renewable' energy is really not as ludicrous as this article makes it out to be.

And of course, Zip brought up a good point.

Perhaps if the US (and by extension, the West) invested some of the money they spent invading Iraq/Afghanistan into figuring out fusion, we'd have the problem licked by now. From the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, only $9 billion was spent on R&D research by IEA members, yet several trillion was spent on wars, propping up oil-producing states, and general defence spending. Of course, I'm not suggesting we cut defence spending and funnel it all into fusion research, but $9 billion in a decade from ALL IEA countries is a paltry sum indeed.

Of course, the fusion power lobby is tiny compared to the fossil fuel lobby (or even the fission power lobby), so it gets virtually ignored as a possible power source. And I'm not saying that if we dumped $100 billion in Fusion, we'd have it next year or something, but with better funding levels researchers would solve the problem far quicker and we'd all be better off.

[Zipperfish]

Quote:

From Asian Correspondent.com:


But that’s where you’d be wrong. Once again, Fairfax and the ABC have remained silent so far, leaving only The Australian newspaper to report on the issue.

Because even the first time it asn;t that big a deal. It was trumpted as the silver bullet that would kill the AGW movement, but it didn't turn out that way. So it's really hard to get excited about the second batch, adn teh quotes--even taken out of context as these are--don't seem as damaging.

And just out of personal interest Batsy, what's the issue of increasing NPP as a potential function of CO2 concentration?

[andyt]

WFT does John Wayne know about wind power anyway? Plus I thought he was dead.

[DrCaleb]

Zipperfish wrote:

DrCaleb wrote:

Bootlegga wrote:

Seriously, just about everything mankind currently uses requires the use of non-renewable resources such as metal or rare earth elements. That is not, and never was the point of renewable energy plans - the point is to ensure we have energy to run our civilization after stuff like oil and coal runs out. And trust me, if oil runs out in the next decade or two, civilization as we know it will end.

It's not a red herring. It's pointing out a serious flaw in the current thinking that 100% 'renewable' is achievable. For example, you can't mine rare earth elements needed in windpower or solar without using hydrocarbons. There are no hybrid or electric only scrapers to remove overburden in ore mines!

I know the article is in a Nuclear Power biased publication, but I've always championed nuclear because it is able to be made avaliable 24/7 and can be increased on demand. You can't run steel mills in developing countries on solar and wind power, and that is exactly what developing countries need most of all is a steel industry.

The article is saying to use hydrocarbons where they are needed and can't be replaced by anything else, but to compensate the rest of our energy demands with 100% renewables is not possible just yet.

I agree with that. But I don't see how the fact that we can't use renewables for 100% of out energy should be reason not to invest. Tke geothermal. Rather low grade energy, really. You're exploiting a tempeature difference between here and some depth below the earth. Why not use it to heat buildings? Then you'd be saving the high-grade stuff--electricity--for high-grade uses.

While some renewables are intermittent, they can work well wiht hydro. So, for instacne, you slow down the hydro turbines while the wind is blowing. They complement each other. And they are not necessarily intermittent. Solar power is constant in sapce, and maybe you can even extract ebergy from those high energy radiation before it hits the ozone layer.

As the Duke points out, wind power isn't cost effective unless subsidized, and then the power it generates is sporatic at best. There are storage means for the power when it does generate efficiently, but those too are inefficient.

From the stats in the article, 250 million pounds per year in develoment + 500 Million pounds a year in subsidies - to me adds up to a few nuclear reactors that could be built and maintained using fewer hydrocarbons than the turbines, and produce much more power over their lifetime. To me, the reason to not invest in wind turbines is because there are currently better uses for our money.

And Geothermal in my area is used for just that. Pump a liquid underground, have it return at comfortable room temperature. It cools in the summer, warms in the winter.

[raydan]

DrCaleb wrote:

And Geothermal in my area is used for just that. Pump a liquid underground, have it return at comfortable room temperature. It cools in the summer, warms in the winter.

Yeah right... and when all that underground hot stuff cools down because of this, then the motion of molten iron alloys in the Earth's outer core will stop and the earth's magnetic field will be no more, exposing us to the solar wind that will strip away the ozone layer.....


We're doomed!!!!