I’ve seen moderate Democrats actually say that Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, seems reasonable, especially compared to the crew of ratfucking incompetents he’s packing into the rest of his administration. It’s not true. He’s as bad as the rest of them, and what we’re seeing is a gradual acclimation to the new politics of corruption and ignorance.
He’s a former ExxonMobil CEO. Do you think he’s going to lead our country’s work to resist climate change? No, he is not.
After more than six hours of testimony, Tillerson backtracked even further, telling senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) that though the evidence of a changing climate was clear, the cause wasn’t. “The science behind the clear connection (to human activity) is not conclusive,” Tillerson said, an assertion as false as the scientific consensus is clear.
He’s just flatly wrong, in defiance of the scientific evidence. That ought to be enough to scuttle his nomination, but you know it won’t be.
He knows what his mission is. It’s to undermine funding and support for initiatives that might hurt the profits of the coal and oil industries.
Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), who believes government money currently spent fighting climate change could be “better spent” elsewhere, pushed Tillerson to commit to abandoning US funding for anti-climate change initiatives. Specifically, Barrasso opposes support for the Green Climate Fund, an international program set up to help developing nations deal with the effects of climate change. The US under Obama has pledged $3 billion.
“In consultation with the president, my expectation is that we are going to look at these things from the bottom up in terms of funds we’ve committed toward this effort,” Tillerson said.
Even in his non-answer, it’s clear Tillerson was open to dropping such funding. Instead, he opined on the power of electricity to lift people out of poverty. A noble aspiration, perhaps, but one that would provide little consolation to communities ravaged by climate change now and in the future. In today’s hearing, Tillerson may not have out-and-out denied the existence of human-caused climate change or the need for the US to help combat it. But his tepidness on global warming betrayed one clear fact: if confirmed, the US will no longer lead on climate change. It will be at the table, sure, but as a difficult guest, not the host.
This is where we’re at. We are the Soviet Union of 70 years ago, when the science of genetics was rejected for ideological reasons. The comparison to Trofim Lysenko’s career is obvious; just substitute climate science for genetics, Tillerson for Lysenko, and the whole damn Republican party for Stalin.
By 1948, scientific dissent from Lysenko’s theories had been outlawed in the Soviet Union, even though the vast majority of Soviet biologists, with increasing (if surreptitious) access to Western publications, knew that those theories were nonsense. The theory that human-induced climate change is not real is likewise nonsense. It is a theory that is only held by those who do not wish to face facts. Those facts, such as record atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and inexorably increasing global temperatures, speak for themselves. We are already in a situation where the 1.5C temperature increase that was the center of the Paris agreement seems to be an absurdly optimistic goal. It is almost sure to be exceeded, although we don’t know where, and we don’t know when.
This uncertainty has been taken as an opportunity by today’s climate change Lysenkoists. Like the cigarette manufacturers who refused to accept the increasingly obvious link between smoking and lung cancer in the 1960s and 1970s, the new Lysenkoists will grab on to any expression of uncertainty to justify their self-interested beliefs. They include, but are not limited to, the representatives of the fossil fuel industry and their political allies. Their pernicious influence is not just confined to the U.S. In my own country of Australia, for example, the Government has been lobbying strongly for more Chinese purchases of coal, and is also about to advance a loan of $Aus 1 billion for the establishment of a giant new coal mine near the already-threatened Great Barrier Reef.
Every person on Trump’s team is a shill for a fraud. Don’t be fooled. Every one of them is purest poison, not just to America’s future, but to the whole of humanity.
Key distinction: The Soviet Union’s insistence on Lysenkoism primarily harmed the Soviet Union itself. Tump’s denial of global warming is a global threat, and the United States won’t even be the most severely harmed by it.
They once did lead? When was that?
Apart from a fairly short time at the end of Obama’s second term, I recall the US as being exactly that difficult guest as described above. Often not even at the table.
In other words, as for climate, they’re just going back to
businessobstructionism as usual.Well, what do you know? The orange fucker is not in power yet and already Democrats are rolling over for him and his attempts to turn the US into a fascistic, polluted oligarchy. I have encountered jellyfish with more spine than so much of the modern Democratic Party.
Tillerson is competent, unlike some of the other picks.
I’m not sure whether to prefer competent evil to incompetent evil in the executive branch.
There’s a lot I agree with these evil people about, such as it should be possible to get a passport. Or we should pave roads. All the basic workings of government.
Competent evil is a scalpel, incompetent evil is a sledgehammer.
It’s not just Democrats. There’s the media which, although critical of TweeterDumb, loves him because he’s a constant source of clickbait. I get swarms of HuffPuff posts on my FB timeline featuring him, his crew of thugs and ideologues, or his homie’s in Congress.
But even media outlets that he has identify has being hostile to him appear to be “giving him a chance.” A Washington Post headline for his press conference: “Despite a decent news conference, questions linger about Trump’s readiness.” From what I’ve read, “decent” is hardly the word for a news conference full of tacit threats to states that didn’t vote for him and attacking news outlets for “fake news” about him.
A Scientific American article on Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s appointment to head a committee on “vaccine safety,” a notion that is positively Orwellian, doesn’t even mention Wakefield or that there’s no reliable evidence linking mercury to autism, much less that we don’t really have any biochemical markers for autism to research such a link.
Won’t the collapse of civilization due to eventual extinction of staple crops be bad for the coal and oil industries?
I suppose the current executives will be dead by then, explaining their indifference.
Trump is gonna need a terrorist attack at some point to stay in power. We need every one to know this long before it happens.
He’s concentrated so much ignorance and destruction in one place that I just don’t see how it can function indefinitely.
He’s firing the entire top tier of the NNSA, the people who oversee our nuclear arsenal. Why would someone do this? Could he be planning to sell the things?
They were appointed by Obama, and are therefore unclean.
#8: But not replacing them.
All conspiracy theories aside, all Trump needs to get a terrorist attack and become King For Life is to be really bad at security.
@numerobis: incompetent can also mean that they fail to get evil things done. The best thing about former Toronto mayor Rob Ford is that he was too incompetent to do as much damage to the city as he wanted to.
Exactly. Incompetent evil fucks everything up, including the implementation of their evil goals.
Competent evil does everything well, including etc.
Which should I prefer?
Problem is that you can fuck things up by being incompetent alone. Not to mention someone with the emotional maturity of a hungry toddler being in possession of the nuclear codes.
Wind turbines and solar PV have both reached the point where they now undercut coal power plants even without subsidies. If trend lines continue – and there’s no reason to think they won’t – wind and solar will soon undercut natural gas. Ergo, America will see declining CO2 emissions regardless of how stupid or evil our leaders are. On this particular issue, the free market is our friend.
The economics are somewhat different in other countries – latitude, cloud cover, and prevailing winds obviously matter here, as do existing regulatory and subsidy regimes – but the numbers are showing the same trend everywhere. The rest of the world will follow our “lead” on this issue.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-100/
Lysenkoism was a huge disaster for the commies.
It killed millions and was part of the reason why the USSR imploded.
1. Some Soviet biologists were sent to the Gulag and many of those died. One of the most famous, Vavilov, was murdered.
2. Soviet agriculture never really got going. And never really recovered from Lysenkoism. The USSR was always short on food and always struggling to feed its people.
The Chinese also adopted Lysenkoism. They also had trouble feeding their people. Famines killed many millions of people.
The truth matters!!!
Rachel Maddow presented a segment that covered the corruption within and between oil companies worldwide. She also focused on ExxonMobil’s investment in Russia, which is many times larger than the company’s investments in other countries.
Rex Tillerson, Exxon, and Russia all have a huge vested interest in removing the sanctions against Russia that the U.S. put in place when Russia annexed Crimea. A single change in policy would result in hundreds of millions of dollars for ExxonMobil.
The video is 20.09 long, and worth every minute. For one thing, Maddow shows, in millions of acres, what agreements for extraction Exxon has in various countries: 1.1 million acres in Papua New Guinea, for example, 14 million acres in the United States, and, wait for it, 63.7 million acres in Russia.
The recently-resigned CEO of ExxonMobil should not be Secretary of State for the USA.
Joel #14:
Except the energy market is anything but a free market. There is no way it can be, because all the needed infrastructure et cetera. So stupid and/or evil leaders will always have plenty of possibilities to prioritise fossil fuel over better or even cheaper alternatives.
@joel (#14)
Oh, they’re working on nipping that in the bud:
http://www.alternet.org/yet-another-state-threatens-penalize-solar-power-users
I wish more people were willing to call this obvious bullshit. It’s standard song and dance for conservatives to talk about how the money to fight climate change could be better spent elsewhere when we should really know that they’ve got zero intent on actually doing anything about those issues either.
That is true. It’s also irrelevant.
The USA was electrified between a century and 80 years ago. There aren’t millions of Americans waiting for someone to put some power lines in.
There are also many ways to generate electricity. Many of which don’t require fossil fuels. Hydropower, wind power, solar, and nuclear among them.
Like on bailing out Wall Street and the banks. Again.
We will spend money on climate change whether we want to or not.
Money not spent on reducing global warming will be spent on…adaptation to global warming. I expect in a few decades the southern coastal states are going to be screaming for money for sea walls to keep the ocean from flooding their coast lines.
Louisiana already has a $50 billion plan to stop the loss of their coastal areas. All they lack is…$50 billion dollars.
Re: Joel (#14)
Emphasis mine. Problem recognised and solved. President Trump shall just have to give generous subsidies to fossil fuel power generation to ‘create jobs’, ‘boost the economy’ and so forth. After all, being the technically elected leader of the supposedly greatest nation on Earth is not about sane policy but money, capitalism and lining your pockets. It’s just like being a governor in ancient Rome: you only have so many years to squeeze your province dry and fill your personal treasury, so you’d better make the most of them.
P.S.: I’d be amazed if the US managed much of an emissions reduction over the next few years. But I’m assuming that the future government will do all in its power to gut every environmental regulation it can, which should encourage more pollution even if fossil fuels are pushed back by more competitive renewables.
komarov #22: Actually CO2 emissions in the US have already been reduced. Our emissions peaked in the mid-oughts and have since fallen by about 10%, even while our economy has kept growing. This is partly due to the growth of renewables, partly due to efficiency, but mainly due to utilities burning natural gas instead of coal because it’s now cheaper. That trend will continue for at least a few more years, since fracking has made gas historically cheap and promises to continue for the foreseeable future. Of course, in 5-8 years renewables will be cheaper than either.
Will Rs actually subsidize coal to stop this trend? Maybe, but I just don’t see it. The original renewables subsidies were sold to lawmakers on three principles: 1) it’s kickstarting a new industry and will stop after a few years; 2) it’s good for the environment; 3) it creates jobs. A coal subsidy would fail points 1&2 and would be highly questionable on point 3.
At any rate, since the rest of the world has mostly smarter and saner leadership than we currently do, global CO2 emissions will soon begin to decline even if the US jacks ours up again.
@#4, numerobis
Most people on this board have already said they prefer the former. Or, at least, they did back when people were pointing out that the Democrats had a history of evil as well as the Republicans. I suppose it depends whose ox is gored, though.
@#7, multitool
I saw a report that he was also firing, effective January 21st, all staff at all the major embassies. As in “on January 20th, shut down the computers, lock the doors, and leave the key under the mat, and don’t come back” fired.
It’s usual for embassy staff to be replaced in a new administration, the old staff is usually gone by June, but the usual practice is to keep the old staff around for a few months to brief the new one and teach them things like how the filing system works and so on. We’re going to have a few weeks in which all our embassies are basically useless because nobody there will be able to find anything or do their jobs — even if they are competent to do those jobs in the first place. I imagine there will be at least one incident bad enough to make the news, based on this alone, by the end of the month.
@joel: Renewables will win on cost in the long run. In the long run we’re all dead. The transition may be unstoppable at this point, but it’s all about rate of change: we need to be firing on all cylinders to stop burning fossil fuels.
Right now, new renewable-energy electric plants are cheaper than new fossil-fuel electric plants (at least they beat coal and oil; natural gas is tighter). However, a new windmill or solar panel is *not* cheaper than an existing fossil-fuel plant, and won’t be for a long while. We need to mothball those existing plants ASAP.
Similarly, new tar sands or new tight-oil wells require oil prices around $60+/barrel to be worth building. But existing operations can continue profitably at much lower prices. And if you build pipelines, and the break-even point falls to $55/barrel.
When we build new fossil fuel infrastructure, we lock in a lot of emissions. We need to stop building it, and we need to mothball infrastructure that works perfectly well and is cheap to operate.
@Vicar: I encourage you to go masturbate in the same room as Harban to your shared fantasies that the commentariat here is all a bunch of blind partisans who can’t see that Democrats and the GOP are just the same.
@numerobis: I encourage you to join the other Democratic tribalists on this board in their circle-jerk to the fantasy that Clinton was going to actually turn against the fossil fuel industry she’s been shilling for, and hired staff from, even though her environmental plans were only about a third as ambitious as the just-barely-possibly-sufficient ones Sanders had. You confuse “not as horrifyingly bad” with “acceptable”.
To joel in #14
And to numerobis in #26 to a lesser extent
I’m super serious about solving for global warming and ocean acidification, and doing that as soon as possible. About 86% of all human CO2 emissions are from electricity production, and liquid fossil fuel transport fuel. Even if we could magically move that 86% of human CO2 emissions to 0 (zero) today, there are open questions as to the amount of damage that is done by the CO2 already in the air, and by the remaining 14% of human CO2 emissions. The Aesop of this story is that we need zero CO2 emissions from our electricity sector.
Further, we should expect massive increases in electricity usage: the rest of the unindistrialized world is going to industrialize and increase electricity consumption, and many current applications that are fossil fuel are going to be replaced by electricity in the future (we hope). Combined, this means that any target of 20% of current human CO2 emissions from the electricity sector is a cruel joke. It completely misses the severity and scope of the problem. I don’t care if you can get to 20% of current human CO2 emissions in the electricity production sector through some cockamamie plan of solar, wind, smart grids, expensive storage, etc. That’s nowhere near good enough. We need to get to 0%.
From your own source:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-100/
Levelized cost of electricity is not an interesting measure, and it should not be used or cited in discussions like this. I appreciate that your link (partially) notices and appreciates this fact, even if you do not.
We don’t care about the cost of intermittent electricity. We care about the cost of on-demand electricity – give or take some load management. At a first degree of approximation, we need to look at the levelized cost of on-demand electricity, not intermittent electricity. (Note: practically speaking, load management opportunities are very limited compared to the amount of variability in solar and wind, and for the purpose of this analysis where the target is 0% human CO2 emissions from electricity, load management can be ignored.)
What measure we should actually be using is a more wholistic, end-to-end measure, which accurately reflects our need for on-demand electricity. The price of solar and wind intermittent generators are coming down quite quickly, but energy storage costs are not. Energy storage costs are close to plateaud, and there are good physical, e.g. physics, reasons to suspect that they’re not going to come down enough.
To understand how screwed we are on this point, please check the following links:
https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
…
To johnmarley in 18
I don’t know about the particulars. However, it’s unsustainable to force the large electricity companies to buyback residential solar at market prices. Again, it’s the difference between intermittent and on-demand generation. Intermittent electricity has substantially less value than on-demand electricity because of the very large expense in turning intermittent electricity into on-demand electricity. The large electricity companies are not merely selling you X joules of electricity per day, or per week. They are selling you guaranteed X watts at every moment of the day. Those are substantially differents ervices.
Why is it unsustainable? It’s like a tragedy of the commons. Forcing the electricity companies to buy back the electricity at market price, plus the assumption that intermittent electricity generation is cheaper than on-demand electricity generation, plus a free market, (and ignoring concerns like grid frequency management), means a race to the bottom. Everyone will rush to provide intermittent electricity, and it will push the on-demand generators out of the market because they cannot recoup the money needed to cover costs. Without enough on-demand generators, then the grid collapses, and no one has electricity.
In other words, there is a lot more that the large electricity companies do than just provide you X joules per day. They need to maintain the wires. They need to maintain enough surplus generation of the right kind to cover peaking, and the other requirements to ensure on-demand electricity. They need to cover enough surplus generation of the right kind to cover frequency control, and a several other things that the general public know nothing about, but which are expensive, and hugely important to maintaining a working grid. The normal residential solar user who can sell back electricity at market price doesn’t have to do any of these critical and indispensible services.
Again, I want to emphasize that I don’t know the particulars of the bill. However, from what minimal information I can gleam from your direct link, it seems that they do not recognize these simple facts.
…
PS:
The only approach that can solve our problems in the foreseeable future, without new technological breakthroughs, is conventional and next-gen nuclear fission power plants. The so-called environmentalists occupy the height of irresponsibility because they dally and delay in their enaction of a serious plan that will fix the problem now. They delay out of dogmatic wishful thinking that a so-called green solution will come along, when the nuclear solution is here right now. The nuclear solution will get us to less than 1% of current CO2 emissions for the electricity sector, which, when combined with a fix for transport fuel, is maybe close enough to actually make a meaningful stand against global warming and ocean acidification. (Of the unavoidable CO2 emissions of nuclear, most of it is from the creation of cement for the building. I am assuming that we’ll have another fix for transport fuels for the mining equipment, but that’s a problem on every approach, including solar and wind.) And yes, I am prepared to argue points about cost, safety, waste, supply of fuel, etc. The short version is most things that you have heard are outright false or misinformed, or the problems are fixable, or the problems are simply far less bad compared to the alternatives.
EL:
That’s hilarious.
Heck of a plateau there.
There is a physical limit to battery storage; we can only increase density about 100x with lithium batteries compared to current production batteries. That’s a pretty wide margin still.
And in terms of production cost, merely scaling up production without changing the underlying tech is still expected to drop the price by half again.
Using a gigantic lead-acid battery to power the entire US for three days is not something I’ve ever seen proposed before. Why would we want that?
Do you want reliable power?
How are you going to get reliable power from wind and solar? Presumably a battery. If you want to talk about the fiction that “large interconnected grids will smooth out the intermittancy”, then I can cite actual historical data to show that this is not true. For smart grids aka load management, I hope that you can accept my position that the goal needs to be 0% CO2 emissions from the electricity, and also accept my claim that load management alone will not help us get to 0% CO2 emissions, e.g. we need storage, or on-demand generators instead of intermittent generators. Did you read the whole link? Or just enough to cherry pick results? It also discusses the availability of lithium reserves, and how that’s woefully insufficient.
I’ll try to respond to your other points later, and better explain myself, and defend my assertions (or admit error).
Let me try again. I address your post at the end of this post.
I’m concerned about reaching 0% CO2 emissions for the grid. I want to start doing that now.
We can drop human CO2 emissions from electricity production to about 0% with only conventional nuclear. We can do this by spending 1% worldwide GDP for 20 years (assuming a much too high cost of 6000 USD / kW for nuclear). France is a historical case study – France did this in less than 20. Having said that, 30 or 40 years might be a more reasonable target, but IMAO 20 years is quite plausible with enough motivation and effort worldwide. This is the scale that we need to be thinking in order to meaningfully combat global warming and ocean acidification.
What can you do without nuclear? 50% reductions in human CO2 emission from electricity production by 2050? As I said, this is a cruel joke. It misses the scale of the problem entirely. With nuclear, I can get to 0% emissions in two thirds of the time.
What is the plan going to be without nuclear? Presumably, it’s going to be mostly wind and solar. What would that even look like? As I argued, it’s going to require storage, and a lot of it.
By current trends, world population will plateau around 2100 at about 10 billion people. This is our target. If you are being serious about global warming and ocean acidification, then this is the target that you must aim for. Judging from today’s electricity usage, a reasonable power usage is 1 kW per person. However, in the future it will be much higher because we will need to electricity heating and transport. It could easily rise to 5 kW per person. (For reference, Germany is currently at 5 kW per person total energy usage, including non-electrical heating.) That comes to 50 TW! This is the scale of the problem that we need to solve.
* Land
How much land does that need for a hypothetical 100% solar? Assume: Sahara desert solar radiation values (251 watt / square meter, yearly average). Seasonal variation in solar radiation means we need another 30% IIRC for the Sahara. Solar cell conversion efficiency of 15% (for polycrystalline silicon cells). Inverter efficiency at 95%. 85% storage round-trip efficiency, for about 80% of the produced electricity. A mere 2x overbuild factor (to allow charging the storage on good days, in order to cover bad days – many green environmentalist plans call for high overbuild factors such as 3x).
Note: I chose polycrystalline silicon for a very good reason – it can scale to the amounts that we need. Other solar cells might have higher efficiencies, longer lifetimes, or cheaper energy manufacture, but they use rarer materials where the available resources cannot scale to meet our target. It’s very unlikely that a single-junction type solar cell is going to get much better than 15% conversion efficiency, and it’s very unlikely that a multi-junction is going to be cheap enough (money and energy) in order to compete with the single-junction cells.
Land area required
= (50 TW) (1 square meter / (251 watt)) (1 / 30% winter overbuild factor) (1 / 15% cell efficiency) (1 / 95% inverter efficiency) (1 / ((85% storage efficiency) (80% fraction stored))) (2x overbuild for charging storage)
= 13.7 trillion square-meter
For reference:
Size of Germany = 0.357 trillion square-meter
Size of Texas = 0.696 trillion square-meter
Size of the Sahara desert = 9.2 trillion square-meter
Size of South America = 17.84 trillion square-meter
This is larger than the entire Sahara desert! It’s most of South America! This is an obscene amount of land. The environmental damage from paving this amount of land with solar cells is obscene. With a 30 year life (realistically it’s probably closer to 15 years), it would be a never-ending project to continually repave this amount of land. It’s unimaginable. It cannot happen on this point alone.
I’m ignoring a bunch of rather severe problems too, such as electrical transmission costs, costs of keeping the solar cells dust-free in the water-poor environment of the Sahara, etc.
* No energy storage
For pumped water storage instead of chemical batteries, I encourage you to see the link above on pumped water storage land area requirements. In short, it’s not going to happen.
How much lithium, or lead, or nickle, would would need for a battery this scale? Thousands of times more than known reserves, and still many times more than even estimated “resources”. If we are going to build this, we would not be working with today’s money prices, nor energy costs for mining and refining. The costs would be drastically more. It’s many orders of magnitude. I’ll spare the numbers.
* EROEI
We should also do a whole systems analysis. To maintain an industrial society, we need lots of energy, and we need it available with a relatively small amount of people in the workforce to supply that energy. Today, with easily available fossil fuels, in an industrial society, about 1% of the total workforce works in energy. If we had to use only farm animals, then many more people would need to work in energy, because farm animals produce much less energy per unit. This sort of problem is indirectly captured by the EROEI measure; EROEI is a simple ratio of gross energy produced by a unit plant, divided by the gross energy required to produce, maintain, and decommission the unit plant. An EROEI of 1 is breakeven, meaning that there’s no extra energy to do useful work. As EROEI goes down, more human labor is required for the same unit of energy. It’s been estimated that we need an EROEI of at least 7 in order to maintain an industrial society. However, fossil fuels are estimated at around 50, which means that even going to 7, a much larger portion of our workforce would have to work in energy. Look up and run the numbers for polycrystalline silicon cells. Even with ideal assumptions (same as above, plus outrageously generous 30 year lifetime), it does not work out.
Total energy manufacture costs: 2.172e9 joules / sq meter of solar cell, including all accompanying equipment. http://science-and-energy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Weissbach-et-al-2013-Energy-intensities-EROIs-and-energy-payback-times-of-electricity-generating-plants.pdf
EROEI
= [ (30 years) (251 watt) (15% cell efficiency) (95% inverter efficiency) ((85% storage efficiency) (80% fraction stored)) ] / [ (2.172e9 joules) (2x overbuild for charging storage) (1 / 70% winter overbuild factor)]
= 3.71
This number is unlikely to improve drastically. Cheaply mass-produceable solar cells are unlikely to get much better than 15% conversion efficiency. Energy storage is unlikely to get much better than 85% round-trip efficient. The energy cost of manufacture, operation, and decommissioning / recycling of cheaply mass-produceable solar cells is unlikely to get much cheaper. The energy cost is a known quantity, based on our experience with computer semiconductor manufacture.
Remember, this uses wildly optimistic assumptions, and it ignores the energy costs of storage (which is often much greater than the solar cells themselves). The whole systems thermodynamic analaysis does not work.
Note: Several authors do silly things like include the human labor converted to an energy cost. I don’t do that. I’m using energy cost numbers that are just for the industrial processes, which is a hard and simple thermodynamic limit on the problem.
* Conclusion
Solar is a non-starter because of any of the arguments I put out above (land use for solar, lack of energy storage, EROEI). Wind suffers the same problems, with slight adjustments in the math.
The fundamental problems are: solar cells have a very low energy production density, and batteries have a low energy density, and the energy costs of manufacture are quite high because solar cells and chemical batteries require high purity materials. This is why fossil fuels and nuclear do not fail these measures of land use, raw material use, and EROEI; they have high energy densities.
PS:
Density doesn’t matter for grid applications. Irrelevant measure. The limiting factors are energy costs, often measured with ESOI, and raw material shortages.
For batteries, it might half the money price, but it won’t drop energy costs in half, and it won’t drop raw material requirements in half.
PPS:
I am now prepared for you to cite many links that talk about optimistic, unproven technologies, tested only in the lab at small scale, with nano-manufacturing techniques not ready for primetime, materials with raw material shortages, etc. This is why I want to compare to nuclear, which requires no new technology, and it’s ready for deployment now, and several nextgen designs look to be much cheaper and safer, and also require no new technology, and could be completed full scale prototyping in less than 5 years. This drastic difference in kind cannot be overstated.
OK, the north fucking pole, the north motherfucking, godfucking pole hit zero degrees centigrade, 32 degrees for the heathens.
I freaked out on that, after a week, I needed many chances of pants.
But, climate change is a conspiracy hoax.
Very well, let the whore wear the whore’s cloak, when it turns quickly into shit, let the bastard wear it like a chain from Dickens.
Yeah, despite your opinions, I’ve read him and many more works.
The reality is, we have precisely zero lateral movement available. We do have a ton of rope and a neck to loop itself into and we do have a negative decade to react to the change in climate, hence, we’re reacting a lot too late.
Let the son of a fuck hang himself and his party, wide and true and let the fucker step proudly off of the long drop platform himself.
Maybe then, we’ll be allowed to unfuck things a bit.
EnlightenmentLiberal, serious question: why do you believe in a single-technology solution?
I ask because serious analysts of energy infrastructure look at a combination of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, biomass, tides, and fossil fuels, along with various storage mechanisms (principally hydro and batteries), grid upgrades, and efficiency improvements. (Though a lot ignore tides because it’s tiny, you barely notice the loss.)
Serious analysts who want to get off fossil fuels figure out how to implement all the others, and measure the cost to minimize the total emissions or the cost to get to “zero” emissions (actually impossible, but you can get very low), or other similar measures.
Nuclear is *one* of the technologies, but it’s not the only one. Serious analysts do not assume that any one technology must do all the work. Pumped hydro storage is *one* storage technology, and nobody assumes it can do it all. Etc.
Imagine if you were looking at transportation. The usual approach is to look at a mix: walking, cycling, buses, boats, planes, trains, and automobiles. The kind of analysis you’re doing is to then say that walking is too slow. Cycling doesn’t work for everyone. Buses and boats are too expensive. To have trains to everywhere you’d need trillions of square meters of rail. Now you’d say, you’ve fairly considered all the options and that leaves only planes. Planes must provide 100% of transportation services around the world, in all situations.
To numerobis
Just because someone claims the title of “expert” does not mean that they should be awarded that respect and deference.
http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/5553
In short, one must vet experts. Otherwise, people can just claim the name “expert” and then we have to automatically trust them, whch is absurd. Do you trust “religious experts”? Of course not. I’ve looked at so-called expert claims, and found them wanting. I have enough education to do some basic vetting of claims, and they fall up short.
Further, there are plenty of other “experts” who do say that nuclear needs to be the majority part of the grid for any foreseeable solution. You are repeating a false dogma that there is a near-universal consensus of experts who say that.
People are not seriously addressing the problem, and that problem statement will include 10 billion people by 2100, with at least 1 kW electric, probably closer to 5 kW electric, with practically zero CO2 emissions from the electricity. We will need very large numbers much sooner as well. Again, if that is your not target, then you are not serious about combating global warming and ocean acidification. Again, even if we do that, and even if we use another suite of technologies for transport fuels (see what I did there? I recognized that nuclear cannot solve transport fuels by itself), that’s only 86% of human CO2 emissions according to current fractions, and even that is probably not enough. We probably need to do more. That is why we cannot allow even 10% fossil fuel usage for the grid – it would not be enough. 10% fossil fuel usage for the grid with 50 TW is already more CO2 emissions than from the current grid. Talking about solutions with 10% fossil fuel usage for the grid is talking about some problem – such as the problem of how to reach 50% so-called renewables of the electric grid by 2050 – but it’s not talking about the problem of global warming and ocean acidification.
There are many people here who are saying that it’s already too late, and you want me to listen to so-called experts who are talking about 80% reduced human CO2 emissions in the grid by 2050? They’re not seriously addressing the problem.
I’ve listened to people like you for 10 years, and where are we? Practically no closer to solving this problem. Had we gone with nuclear, we could be a third, or optimistically even half of the way there, to reach 0% CO2 emissions from electricity production worldwide. (We still need something for transport fuels, to reach a 86% reduction of total human CO2 emissions, which must be something in addition to nuclear electric grid. And even then, we probably need more.)
Paraphrasing one of my above links, a dozen inadequate solutions can be combined to produce a working solution, but a dozen woefully inadequate solutions cannot, and apart from nuclear, all we have are the woefully inadequate kinds. Except for nuclear, everything is stuck in the rounding error status. Combining 10 rounding errors is still a rounding error.
The only solution that has is demonstrated and likely to work now to reduce human CO2 emissions from the grid to 0% is primarily nuclear. It could be 50% nuclear and 50% other for all I care for this level of the argument, but it has to be primarily nuclear. There is no plausible solution to this problem that does not include a massive roll-out of nuclear.
Again, concerning the individual technologies:
Wind probably won’t work because of EROEI and intermittency problems. Standard polycrystaline silicon solar probably won’t work because of EROEI and intermittency problems and land use problems. Other variants of solar probably won’t work because they’re much too costly – in money and energy costs – such as multi-junction solar. Standard geothermal has limited geographical applicability. Manufactured geothermal suffers from EROEI, i.e. for deep bore holes; rocks are a very bad heat conductor, which means that the surrounding rock will cool down relatively quickly, and you have exhausted your deep bore hole. There are also huge problems with these designs concerning the basics, like how do you get a seal to last that long, reliably, and cheaply (money and energy).
Hydro as prodution is great, but most / all of the good spots are tapped. You cannot tap them again. It’s unlikely that we could even double our hydro capacity, which means it’s a rounding error in terms of the overall problem. Hydro as storage can be scaled at most to a size that is a rounding error for the scale of the problem. Please see the link above again for further information.
Biomass has its limits again in EROEI and land usage – it’s a rounding error in the total solution. Fossil fuels? I thought I exlained myself. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage to 0% as soon as fucking possible if we really want to combat global warming. With the rest of the world’s population industrializing, even a 10% fossil fuel usage in the grid is completely unacceptable. You are not taking this problem seriously enough, and you haven’t looked at the numbers seriously enough, if you are contemplating any appreciable amount of fossil fuel usage.
All storage mechanics don’t work on EROEI. Hydro is closest, but the amount of hydro that we need is more Earth surface area than all of the freshwater lakes in the world put together. Any chemical battery is a factor of 10x worse than hydro in terms of EROEI, aka too far from practicality by a factor of about 10x.
What do grid upgrades have to do with anything? Attempting to solve the intermittency problem? I already mentioned that the actual historical data of wind and solar do not bear this out. Actual data shows that we should regularly expect periods of a week at a time with practically no wind. When that happens in winter in non-equatorial regions, you get practically zero power from solar and wind for a week at a time. Long distance transmission will not help this. Are you referring to load management? How are you going to load-manage a week-long power outrage? People would freeze and starve. No running water either.
Efficiency improvements? Go ahead, take even a factor of 10x off the land usage and resource usage numbers from my previous post. You still lose. As for EROEI, EROEI is unaffected by reducing load – EROEI is independent of the required demand. Efficiency improvements in the production and storage will improve the EROEI, but for reasons already stated we’re unlikely to see a substantial enough move on these numbers.
I should add: This is a religious faith-based mantra, with no evidence in facts. This sort of “reasoning” is used as a get-out-of-jail free card. It’s substantially similar to “don’t trust the devil, because the devil is a better arguer than you”. It has the effect of automatically immunizing a believer against counter-claims. The problem is the claim makes it damned near impossible to actually examine the claim, because it makes it so easy to move the goalposts. Ex: “Oh, solar won’t work. How about a combination of a dozen other technologies? Oh, wind won’t work, what about […]”.
As I said, we needed to fix this problem decades ago, and we’re stuck here now, with practically no progress made. We could be practically 0 CO2 emissions from the grid if we just went nuclear 3 decades ago, when we should have. And again, any solution for global warming and ocean acidification is going to require practically 0 CO2 emissions from the grid, because to replace fossil fuels for transport and heating, we’re going to move to electricity as the replacement (whether that’s in the form of synthetic liquid fuels made from electricity, or direct electro-chemical batteries).
Finally, I want to emphasize again that this assertion that there is a consensus of experts is phony. There is no such consensus. There’s a subtle move here where the consensus of experts for global warming, which is real, is then moved to pretend that there is a consensus of experts for this green tripe, and there is no such consensus of experts.
Indeed. That’s why I don’t take you seriously.
You dismiss every single other technology individually on the basis that it can’t provide all the power on its own. I called you out on it … and you proceeded to do exactly what I mocked you for doing.
I find it a very curious way of thinking.
No matter; the green tripe is taking over the world as we speak, without deference to the nuclear engineers.
Indeed, what is popular is always what is right, yes? So, slavery should return, bloodletting should’ve never been abandoned and taxation should be illegal.
Obviously not.
What I’m seeing is a rejection because of the notion of the dreaded N word, nuclear. With today’s technology, rejecting nuclear is nothing short of religion, a faith that it’s 100% unsafe and unsustainable.
The reality isn’t anywhere near that, as there are now designs that are walk away safe, if we ever bother to build the things.
Personally, I’d love to see us abandon uranium based plants and shift to thorium based plants. It’s a far more common element on this planet and it can “burn” the waste from uranium based plants, *plus* use every other power generation technology that we have available to us.
I’m currently living in NW Louisiana, so tidal power isn’t an option, but we do get a lot of wind, save on becalmed days, which are rare. Solar is OK in the summer, but we’re experiencing a two week overcast period. Geothermal isn’t an option, the geology is wrong for it here. Natural gas is plentiful, but we’d add a *lot* of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Clean coal is cool, I’ve saw that with my own eyes at a water purification plant (true, it was part of the filtration system). ;)
Burning coal, see the CO2 problem, not to mention some rather nasty residue after burning it.
What is needed is a blend of all technologies, reflecting the region that they’re to be used in.
We also do need to modernize our power grid, it’s seriously antiquated and by definition, far less efficient than it should be.
We have the technology to mitigate global warming, we lack the will and part of that lack of will is arguing against one solution or another, along with unrealistic expectations.
Please engage with my actual arguments, as opposed to the strawman that is in your head. Also, please knock off the cherry-picking, Here, let me help you out and quote the bits that I already posted which are relevant. Please try to address my actual arguments, and please try to address my strongest arguments, instead of a “weaker” cherry-picked one.
Quoting me:
Quoting me:
Quoting me:
And no it is not. Germany is still hovering around 18% combined solar and wind in 2016, as measured as yearly production Joules over total electricity production Joules. How long have they been going at it? And to what benefit? Germany has some of the highest CO2 per capita in Europe. Whereas, nuclear France has some of the lowest CO2 per capita in Europe. One has to ignore reality in order to make such an outrageous claim. How long is it going to take to reach 0% CO2 emissions for electricity production? Can it even reach 0% in this century? We don’t have the time to wait another 80 years. We need to fix it now. This green engineering is a massive worldwide collective rejection of reality. It’s the modern world’s Lysenkoism.
you know what is tiresome it is reading and listening to arguments about global warming. It is either it is a hoax and a fraudulent attempt by “they” for some reason or other. Or it is like this one where every solution and partial solution is criticized and critiqued as to its weaknesses as being wholly inadequate to the task. while “their” favored solution is not analyzed to the same depth at all particularly the decommissioning costs of fission reactors just brushed aside as are the real long term waste problem. If things are going to be taken seriously then you can not pick and choose which are relevant and which are not other wise it is nothing more than another fucking sales pitch from some one speaking for those with a vested interest in one solution or another.
We got a new POTUS whose main skill is the sales pitch a lot of good it is going to do us.
We can argue for ever in the end we will be buying our solutions from those around the world who have them for sale probably wont be “Made In Th USA”
uncle frogy
You have no idea what you’re talking about. There is no long term waste problem. It’s a political charade, sold to rubes like you.
Oh please sir, I do not understand just how there is no waste problem. I understood that high level waste has a half life in the 100,000s of years. and that low level waste is also dangerous for a similar very long time. What are going to do with all of that stuff for that length of time?
What do we do with the old decommissioned plants, the reactor and containment structures all that contaminated concrete and re-bar and miles and miles of pipe and wire and structural steel.
What is the cost of all of that?
how does that compare to the costs of decommissioning any of the others.
uncle frogy
Hey Rube, you are another delusional fool like the Soggy Ape man.
Here’s the question that will separate you from a presuppositonal crank: What evidence will convince you, you are WRONG? Then, would you really change your mind if it was presented to you?
To unclefrogy
You’re typing this on a computer. Producing that computer produces toxic waste that lasts forever! Same for solar cell construction – it’s really quite nasty. Yet, you don’t seem that concerned about that toxic waste, even though it lasts forever! You seem to have put the problem into perspective. I’m just asking that you also put the nuclear waste “problem” into perspective. You have to ask the question “ok, how bad is it really?”, and the answer is “really quite mild compared to other industrial processes that we don’t think twice about”.
Example:
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
Once you realize the scales involved, it’s a complete non-problem. Practically speaking, the problem is entirely a creation of the political process. It’s not an engineering nor safety nor money problem.
Also, alternatively, if you don’t want to wait those several hundred years to reprocess for additional resources, we could just dump it in the ocean within a decade or two of leaving the reactor. Here is one example (specifically with the amended policy on the page where it removes the possibility of retrieval).
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/06/a-modest-proposal-for-nuclear-waste-disposal/
This kind of approach relies on the fact that most of the ocean floor is very deep, and dead. Nothing lives there. Also, sediment builds up rather quickly too. Once we dump the thing there, it will quickly (in geologic time scales) be covered, and thus it’s going nowhere. Even in the case of some leaks, it’ll be covered by a lot of sediment, and the ocean is so large that even some small leaks will diffuse to no harm at all to any life, human or otherwise.
…
To Nerd
Do you disagree with my insistence that we try to do these things as soon as possible? Again, see else-thread where many suggest that it might be already too late to avoid some particularly nasty effects of global warming. Thus, I hope there’s no disagreement on a standard like “as soon as possible”.
I also think that as long as we have a plan that will very likely work within our constraints – including physical possibility, other environmental damages, political feasibility and money costs – then it would be extremely irresponsible to delay taking immediate action to implement that plan, on the unsubstantiated hope that some unspecified research will result in some unspecified technological improvement which will allow some other plan to succeed in the future. Every moment that we delay, we put more and more CO2 into the air.
Someone names a specific plan that we can start doing now, and all of the necessary accompanying evidence which should convince a reasonable person that this will plan will likely be successful at sufficiently reducing human CO2 emissions in the necessary time frame to significantly counteract – ideally halt and reverse – CO2 build-up in the air and ocean, in order to significantly counteract – ideally halt and reverse – global warming, ocean acidification, and other problems. This plan may involve different technology mixes. This plan may involve technology mixes that are tailored to the individual circumstances of countries and regions.
Alternatively, someone gives some physical or economic reason why the nuclear plan will not work, or someone gives some reason why the nuclear approach is worse than global warming and ocean acidification.
Obviously, there is a huge political reason why it won’t work (most don’t want it), but in public policy debates like this one, it’s assumed that both sides have some amount of fiat power, so that the discussion becomes “what should we as a country / world do?”, instead of the discussion “what will we as a country / world do?”. From where I’m sitting, it seems obvious that we as a world will continue to burn coal, and global warming and ocean acidification will continue unabated, and we lose. Thus, I am taking part in discussions like this to hopefully change “what will happen” to be something closer to “what I want to happen”.
The nuclear plan will work to drop human CO2 emissions from electricity production to practically 0, and there’s every reason to believe we could get it done within 30 years, at a reasonable money cost, with very little associated environmental damage (comparable or less-bad than any suggested green solution). Even then, my target of 30 years might not be aggressive enough. Based solely on the global GDP argument and using 1% of that per year, we could maybe do it in 20.
I haven’t seen an actual serious and reasonable plan that we can start working on now that can achieve this goal of practically 0 human CO2 emissions within 30 years that does not involve substantial amounts of nuclear, and that does not involve massive decreases to standard of living and perhaps massive human starvation and death.
Having just made the speech about fiat power, even I believe that it’s very hard to overcome some human political problems. I believe that we can overcome the misinformation about nuclear power, but I believe that it will be very, very difficult to convince the indistrualized world to de-industrialize, and to convince the rest of the world to not industrialize. We need something that is cost-comparable to coal – otherwise humans will probably continue to burn coal, and we lose. Some amount of carbon taxes could be suffered, and I support the enactment of as high of carbon taxes as we can possibly get, but I believe that we cannot convince the world to support enough carbon taxes that de-industrialization will happen. Further, absent nuclear, I believe that the “acceptable” amount of carbon taxes will not be enough to stop global warming and ocean acidification.
PS:
And again, just because other people choose not to read for comprehension and be dishonest about my positions, I again state that a nuclear plan would not be enough on its own. We would need some other solution for transport fuel. Maybe it’s batteries. Maybe it’s CO2-neutral synthetic gasoline. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s a mix. I don’t know. This is a separate problem, but all of the remotely promising approaches seem to require cheap and clean and CO2-neutral electricity. That gets us to 86% of all human CO2 emissions. And maybe even that’s not enough, and we need to start looking at the other sources of human CO2 emissions, and what we can do about them.
come on while lead is forever I can stand next to a ton of it even sleep on it and unless I eat it or get into my body very little is likely to happen. you can’t say that about nuclear waste.
Of course waste is a problem and it will always be a problem I am just really tired pushing it aside as if it was a none problem simply solved if you was “Emporer of da World”.
you ain’t, it is too fucking bad that people want a say in how the fucking world is run.
and pardon me if I think “dumping it the ocean” sounds just a little to easy to be true
uncle frogy
There are two long term storage facilities where nuclear waste is stored underground, with a fair amount of room for more waste.
Dismantling the plants, that takes quite a few years for the radioisotopes induced in the structure of the reactor to decay, Google “Windscale fire” and the dismantling of Three Mile Island, Windscale was just recently defueled – after being sealed after the 1957 fuel fire.
That said, the fuel assemblies can be used in a thorium fuel cycle and reacted into much shorter lived isotopes (the downside of that is, as a rule, the shorter lived the isotope, the “hotter” it is.
As for just dumping it in the ocean, no, just no. Get real, we don’t need to move backwards in disposal of waste by polluting our oceans, we need to move forward.
Chemical waste from semiconductor and solar cell manufacturing can be reacted and neutralized, it’s routinely done at many facilities today.
We need to use multiple modes, each suited best to the area. In this area, solar would work well in the summer, but wind would be excellent all year round. In areas of shallow granite bedrock, geothermal would be an excellent solution.
When I was living in Qatar, I had saw an excellent energy generation plant design that used solar collectors, which heated anhydrous ammonia as the working fluid, with the only excess product from the cooling system being water from the atmosphere, which could then be filtered and utilized as drinking water
And had you read my link, you would see that the same is true for various flavors of nuclear waste too, especially with basic reprocessing.
Yes I can, and I just did, and it is entirely a non-problem by any reasonable measure. Dump it down a deep borehole, or put it in the bottom of the ocean, possibly preferrably in a subduction trench zone. It’s a complete non-problem. It’s a fiction invented and perpetuation by ignorant and dogmatic green people like you.
You don’t want it to be fixed, because you are just anti-nuclear as a faith position. You cannot handle having it solved, because that’s one of the remaining roadblocks to accepting nuclear, and accepting that you’ve seemingly spent a good portion of your life on a lie.
Enlightenment Liberal sez:
OK, so I’m not a microbiologist, but my sister is, and she’s actually been to the ocean floor a few times. So, per her, a few papers to peruse:
Nature 410, 891-897 (19 April 2001) | doi:10.1038/35073504; Received 5 September 2000; Accepted 2 March 2001
Increased sedimentation rates and grain sizes 2–4 Myr ago due to the influence of climate change on erosion rates
Marine Geology
Volume 352, 1 June 2014, Pages 409–425
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.margeo.2014.02.009
A review of prokaryotic populations and processes in sub-seafloor sediments, including biosphere:geosphere interactions
• R. John Parkes, ,
• Barry Cragg,
• Erwan Roussel,
• Gordon Webster,
• Andrew Weightman,
• Henrik Sass
From the abstract of the latter:
In geologic time we’re all extinct. In human time, the rate of sediment buildup is measured in mm/year.
As the waste you’re speaking of is longer lived isotopes, why waste them by dumping them into an ocean when they could be safely fissioned in a thorium fuel cycle?
Anything remaining would have half-lives ranging from a few years to a handful of decades, then be quite safe to be around.
To What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym
Cool. Still, I think that doesn’t contradict my points, although I might want to use a different word than “dead” in the future. Devoid of multicellular life perhaps? “Not going anywhere” as well?
EnlightenmentLiberal,
That’s fine, but the issue is that once you admit that the ocean floor is not dead, your case becomes a lot harder, and you can’t just dismiss the concerns of people like unclefrogy out of hand. You have to recognize that what we don’t know about the ocean is orders of magnitude larger than what we do know, and specifically we don’t know what the effects of dumping nuclear waste there would be upchain. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate your argument, but it’s not as easy a case as you’d like.
As to the rest of your argument, above you contrasted France and Germany, and castigated Germany for abandoning nuclear. For the record, I agree that Germany overreacted; countries that generate large proportions of energy via nuclear power shouldn’t abandon that for carbon. But the real question is, what should replace the carbon that we are currently burning? To answer that, it would help to look at what other countries are doing. To that end, did you know that recently Scotland produced more than 100% of its energy for one day via wind? More to the point, Scotland has made a concerted effort to develop renewable energy resources, and as of 2015 generated more than half of the energy it consumed via renewables, and the proportion is likely to grow.
My point is not to say that every country can emulate Scotland, but rather that one size doesn’t fit all. I don’t deny that nuclear is part of the solution, but that doesn’t justify ignoring the real problems with nuclear, or dogmatically dismissing other sources.
To What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym
Let me try to keep this short (even though I’ll fail).
Your entire post strikes me as an appeal to the fallacy “argument to moderation”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
In spite of your implicit appeal to the fallacy “appeal to moderation”, you actually haven’t contradicted my point at all, which is that we need massive rollout of nuclear for any plan right now to stop global warming and ocean acidification. I don’t care about what the remaining 20% or 30% will be, as long as the rest is nuclear. Do what you like. I suspect that most of the remaining 20% or 30% should also be nuclear based on money cost and environmental impact. The need to overcome the public’s irrational dislike of nuclear is my primary purpose here, which is just an intermediate goal so that we can stop global warming and ocean acidification.
I don’t care about single celled creatures and other micro-organisms. Their survival on isolated patches on the seafloor is a non-issue for me. I agree a full and proper analysis should be done before doing the dumping plan, but you have come nowhere close to justifying the amount of skepticism. The mere existence of micro-organisms is to be expected, and I was wrong earlier to not expect it, and also by itself changes nothing in the calculus. It’s incredibly unlikely to leak out of the steel and concrete container. It’s incredibly unlikely to leak out of the deep burial that it will be given in the ocean floor. Even if some leaks out of some containers, and leaks out of the ocean floor, the incredibly small amount of waste, combined with the massive ocean, means that it will very probably not be a problem to anything. Further, because of the amount of time that would be necessary to develop a leak would be a very long time, the waste would have become even far less harmful in the meantime.
I don’t care if Scotland got half of its energy in a year from wind. That’s an irrelevant measure. Who cares? Why do you think that this has anything to do with the goal that we actually care about, which is practically 0 CO2 emissions from electricial generation, with 99.9% grid uptime, with massive increases in electrical demand? They’re simply unrelated because of the non-existence of sufficiently cheap and efficient energy storage. You need to do an hour-by-hour analysis instead. You bring this up as something that should make me reconsider, and all it actually does it further reinforce my initial impression about your ignorance and biases.
I spent a brief amount of time looking into your single Scotland day example. I’m seeing a lot of incredibly sketchy details when I look into the Scotland claim concerning that day. It seems like it’s the standard dishonest green whitewashing. I’m not accusing you of being dishonest. It seems that you’re just repeating a lie that someone else said.
Problem 1: The actual data does not support the claim. The claim at face value is about the ability of wind generation to meet the demand on a minute-by-minute analysis, and the data does not support the claim. The data does support is the contention that available wind generation, summed up through the day, expressed as Joules, exceeds the power demand for the day, summed up through the day, expressed as Joules. Only by assuming perfectly free and efficient energy storage can you go from the data to the claim made. (You can also bridge the gap by assuming the pernicious myth that summing over wide enough geographic distribution changes wind and solar patterns into roughly constant production.)
Problem 2: From the sources that I can find, it’s an open question if there is sufficient transmission capability to even allow this to happen.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/scotland-meets-106-of-power-needs-with-wind
Problem 3: As I look more and more into this claim, there seem to be additional difficulties, such as the very real possibility that these numbers of wind generation include lots of wind generation that was curtailed, e.g. dumped from the grid / not allowed to enter the grid!
http://euanmearns.com/scotland-england-electricity-transfers/
PS:
This is just another example in the long history of lies and misinformation from the greens. Again, I’m not calling you a liar. I’m calling your sources incompetent or liars. Why am I so antagonistic? Because the so-called green experts are filled with liars, cheats, and frauds, and they have shown absolutely zero inclination to actually police their own members.
As an example, If I get some time, I’ll detail the grossly dishonest actions of a certain so-called “expert” by the name of Mark Jacobson. He is a professor at Stanford. The guy is so dishonest that he should have been drummed out of academia, and yet he is still given expert status in the green community. Just a few months ago, when I had NPR on in the car, I was listening to a program by the Commonwealth Club of California, where they invited Mark Jacobson on as an energy expert. I was disgusted.
Just the other day, after making my previous post, I again heard another so-called expert on NPR cite Mark Jacobson my name, and claim that he is the leading expert on a 0% nuclear, 0% fossil fuel solution to the electrical grid, worldwide. This infuriated me so much that I made some time to post this.
How do I know that Mark Jacobson is a fraud who should never again be cited as an expert in anything? This is how I know.
Let me first note that all of the following sources are readily available online in full, and freely.
Article in popular magazine “Scientific American”
Issue: November 2009
Article Title: A PATH TO SUSTAINABLE ENERGY BY 2030
Authors: Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi
?? Unstable URL: http://www.nonukesyall.org/pdfs/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf
No other context is provided for the quote.
Where does he get this information? Probably from the following paper that he wrote himself.
Paper in Energy & Environmental Science
Title: Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security
Author: Mark Z. Jacobson
Received 12th June 2008, Accepted 31st October 2008
First published as an Advance Article on the web 1st December 2008
DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
?? Unstable URL: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/ReviewSolGW09.pdf
How do I know that he probably used this paper to justify the claim? Well, Jacobson makes a claim that is similar to the quoted claim from the Scientific American article in the following paper that he authored:
Title: Providingall Global Energy with Wind, Water, and Solar Power, Part I: Technologies, Energy Resources, Quantities and Areas of Infrastructure, and Materials
Authors: Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi
Energy Policy, in Press
Submitted September 1, 2010; Revised November 11, 2010; Accepted November 22, 2010
?? Unstable URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YuHAue1F3KohXhrf6__HsxLHvNwFQoz7Gsr72wCrwQ1Gy0zUtdLTZiRjXuvd/view
First problem. Notice how this paper makes the claim “9-25”, and notice how the Scientific American article merely says “25”. That’s questionable at best. It’s highly misleading. Cherrypicking.
It gets worse.
Let’s look at one of the papers that he cites. In particular, this is the paper that I already cited above. Let’s dive into the paper and see what it says.
I’ll skip quoting it at length. You can see it yourself. In short, Jacobson argues with an implicit premise that our time scale of concern of CO2 emissions should be the immediate future. Therefore, we should take into account how long it takes to build alternative technologies, and assume that fossil fuels will be used in the meantime, and we should apply the CO2 emissions from these fossil fuels, i.e. coal, as the emissions of each alternative technology, according to the build time of each alternative technology. A kind of “opportunity cost”.
I’m ok with this in the context of the original paper. That’s a reasonable topic for a paper, and the paper makes this clear. My problem is that Jacobson uses this work, without citation, in the Scientific American journal, without all of this context! This amounts to gross dishonesty. The claim in the Scientific American article is clear to any reasonable reader, and it is that this CO2 emission is for nuclear and wind in normal operating mode. Imagine one’s surprise to learn that the nuclear number includes substantial amounts of coal!
It gets much, much worse.
Bolding added to following quote:
That’s right. He is using the assumption that increased use of nuclear power for electricity production will lead to regular, periodic, nuclear war, and estimates the amount of CO2 emissions from these regular, periodic, nuclear wars.
See section “4d. Effects of nuclear energy on nuclear war and terrorism damage” for further details of this asinine calculation, including:
(Slight formatting changes to following text, “^-1”.)
How can you even write all of that with a straight face in a peer reviewed paper is beyond me.
It’s also sad that it even passed peer review. It’s especially sad that the 2010 paper passed peer review – you know, the paper that just cited the 2008 paper as showing that nuclear produces “9-25” as much CO2 emissions as wind. Of course, this is not particularly surprising, given the relatively low standard that is “peer review” in the real world.
Finally, look at the first quote of this post, and rectify that with the knowledge that Jacobson justifies that context-less assertion by appealing to a nuclear war every 30 years. The original quote is clearly made to communicate that conventional nuclear power in conventional operation emits much more CO2 than wind in conventional operation. Yet, it’s based on the gross dishonesty of including CO2 from coal power, and the beyond the pale asspull numbers of CO2 from a nuclear war every 30 years.
For another source that goes into some more details, I suggest this link:
http://www.theenergycollective.com/charlesbarton/49358/jacobson-beyond-cherry-picking
I see stuff like this time and time and time again. This is why I have absolutely zero respect nor trust for any so-called green experts. They have completely failed to police their own. They are stock full of bald-faced liars.