Renewable energy

https://www.withouthotair.com/
Well worth reading.

When you've read it, discuss below.

OG Sustainable: The tree.

Plant a tree. Grow a tree. Enjoy the oxygen. Use the shade. Cut the tree down. Harvest seeds. Build a house. Burn the rest of the tree for energy.

What does OG mean?

Urban Dictionary: OG

1 Like

AM Slang: Original Gangster - "Authentic."

1 Like

How much energy will I waste reading it ?

2 Likes

The 10-page PDF (summary) is approachable:
synopsis10.dvi (withouthotair.com)

Unfortunately, a quick browse indicates that UK is the baseline and the data presented is prior to 2009 ... like dude, this is 2023Q2.

We have an addiction to fossil fuels, and it’s not sustainable. The developed world gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels; Britain, 90%. And
this is unsustainable for three reasons.

My goal is not to pick winners, but to present honest quantitative facts
about all the options. Having said that, I now highlight a few sacred cows
that don’t fare too well under the spotlight of quantitative attention, and a
few that do.

The author then presents a numerically biased approach to lots of "bad" stuff, hydrogen cars as an example.

IMO, alternative energy seems to be a "soft" idea which involves numerous technologies that when taken collectively meets the needs of fossil fuels. The only unity here is that the ideas can be listed in one sentence. Everything must be online to achieve the desired goal. What is often referred to as a staged-approach.

If one believes in global warming, then the time to act on fossils fuels has already passed; too late reads many scientific articles in 2023.
But "too late" does not mean that some of the worst cannot be avoided. Unfortunately, smart people do not control the industrial complex and the ceaselessly driven need to earn profits. Oh, these are public institutions which issue stock and those stocks are held my many individuals and institutions that service retirement accounts. Oops.

Rich nations are being blackmailed into paying poor nations for global-warming damages and to provide technology and expertise to elevate the poor nation into not using fossil fuels... what about those farting animals? Yea, synthetic meat.

Humans as a species are too selfish to ban together if self-sacrifice is required. Case-in-point: my longtime friend just purchased a shiny new truck with an EPA rating of 19/27. A hybrid version was available, but considered too expensive. Sadly, he had a truck adequate for his (very) occasional needs; but new truck will be used like an automobile for road trips. Yes, stupid comes to mind.

Unless petrochemical products are priced into the pain-point, people will not be persuaded to change. At the extreme, poorer people will not be able to afford to drive to work and not everyone can work from home. Oh, my, what to do?

Personally, I did a wee-bit by going to a hybrid and now consistently get 50+MPG both city and highway. I anticipated 18 months ago the increase in gasoline prices and made a "me" choice. But just a drop of water in the sea. But I am keeping my natural gas stove regardless of what.

The situation is dire; immediate action is required. However, the current phased-in approaches are lame and many Nations will not participate. Small nations will hold rich nations hostage and demand respirations for all the pollution industrial nations pumped into the atmosphere.

Maybe mankind is just ants to the Universe and a great intelligence will just drop by and sprinkle us all with Amdro; solving the problem.

ChatGPT ?

No, just 3rd cup of coffee.

I dont drink much coffee these days.

Although the weather should be nice tommorow, so a long cycle finishing in the Coffee#1 in town having a cup of tea seems in order.

1 Like

There is no "renewable energy". And there is no "sustainable energy". Who ever came up with that missed physics 101.

As one who follows climate change, I'm embarrassed that I wasn't familiar with "Without Hot Air" which was published in 2009 or with MacKay who died in 2016.

One interesting takeaway is how things have changed in the 15 years since it was published. The synopsis talks about concentrated solar which, due to the price drop in solar voltaic, is largely a dead end or at least niche technology in 2023. We've reached a point where wind and solar are broadly cost competitive or better with fossil fuels for grid power. Scaling this, of course, requires solving the intermittency problem with wind and solar, but economics out of the way of initial penetration of those technologies is a hopeful start.

A fundamental problem with solving climate change is that so much of the cost is externalized. I can happily live my first world western life knowing that I have the means to deal with most any plausible consequence during my lifetime while those dealing with the real cost are elsewhere and largely in the future.

Yea, but when "politicians talk", there is unlimited amounts of energy to be gathered if they can just get our tax dollars to support their schemes.

As many (most?) educated and reasonable people will say, "... we must do something...", that something is not well defined and often is selectively applied to "not me" and referenced in a future timeframe.

In the context of this discussion, "renewable" is a political term; example: lumber all the trees as long as you replant in kind and number. Recharging one's Tesla from the power grid only makes sense if the grid is "green" and not coal, atomic, or gas-fired boilers. Even falling-water on a turbine may not be green if the dam causes major disruptions in downstream water availability.

Humans are creatures "of the moment" and are miserable at pre-me and post-me thinking. Human life is simply too short to put even 1000 years into accurate prospective as critical scientific data is on the order of a magnitude less (I.e. 100 years.) Scientists in their specialities are prone to extrapolation and often to personal bias. A 4.4 billion year old space rock (3rd Rock) has a long and dramatic history but 1000 years is simply rounding-error.

Anyway, how can JoePublic trust scientists running around looking for dark energy and dark matter? I personally think non-scientific minds do not trust scientists; I worked with 23 PhDs, each a different discipline, and I can say that some really-farout ideas get floated around the breakroom.

Science and engineering has taken man from the end of the middle-ages to today. But only the last 300 years of industrial advances have been significant in disrupting Mother Earth and things are really in a mess (we are advised.) Yet individual humans remain selfishly attached to their comforts and are unwilling to conceed our lifestyle and possessions.

I am old and do not expect to see a solution beyond nations shouting success while achieving little to nothing. Here in the U.S.A. our freedoms are being taken away quicker than government reduction in dirty energy.

If earth gets hits by one big "killer" asteroid, dirty energy will likely not matter anyway. Continuing that thought, I wonder if Dark Energy is 'clean' or 'dirty'?

Sorry, but this is not true. I grant that at the terminals of the generator it might well be true that solar and wind are at a similar price to fossil fuel generated electricity, but:

So you have hidden costs for wind and solar that are conveniently missed from the true cost. Either you need huge batteries, of a size that is unimaginable for any realistic level of storage, or other storage media, such as pumped hydro, also on a scale that is impractical. Alternatively, and what is happening on an increasing scale, you use fossil fuel power stations as backup. So you have fossil fuel power stations burning fuel but not generating electricity. This is both expensive (but doesn't get added to the cost of wind and solar) and defeats the whole point of renewable generation as burning fossil fuel is still required.

Of course there is another solution to this: Accept that the lights will go out whenever there is insufficient renewable capacity for the load.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, but intermittency doesn't matter as much as cost if a small percentage of the grid is intermittent and matched to the system peaks. Obviously the whole grid can't be intermittent, but in the current environment wind and solar installations are being built because it is profitable to do so.

It's also important to recognize that even without considering renewables, the grid consists of a combination of baseload power plants that are not typically throttled (nukes and high efficiency fossil fuel plants) and peaking plants that are designed to handle the variation in load. Typically they aren't burning fuel if there isn't demand.

You are right, intermittency doesn't matter if it is a small percentage of the load, but it is no longer a small percentage of the load. I'm not going to search for actual figures, but I have in recent times heard headlines something like '40% of UK electricity now supplied by wind and solar'. 40% might not be right (I suspect it's too low), but I have certainly heard figures in that ball park recently in the UK. 40% is not a small percentage of the load, it is a very significant portion. If 40% is coming from wind then there will be a substantial amount of gas fired capacity on line, burning fuel but not generating anything. Also, in the UK winter of 2022 - 2023 coal fired capacity was 'warmed up' but not used. 'Warmed up' means the boilers will have been fired ready, so coal burnt. I think it takes 24 hours to start a coal fired generating set (I can find out for sure if you like, my brother was in the industry until he retired), so 'warmed up' presumably means fired almost to the point generating for close to 24 hours, but not actually generating.

By its very nature solar and wind are NOT matched to the system peaks, they are matched to whatever the weather gives us, that's the problem. Long, cold periods in winter are common in the UK. Stable weather system over the whole country that does not move for days bringing low temperatures (so all those electrically powered heat pumps need more electricity) and little wind (so all those wonderful wind turbines are not powering those heat pumps). As for solar in winter, 6 hours of weak sunshine, so 18 hours of no sunshine.

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.