From the IEEE Spectrum Journal: A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy
It takes several lifetimes to put a new energy system into place, and wishful thinking can’t speed things along
By Vaclav Smil
In June 2004 the editor of an energy journal called to ask me to comment on a just-announced plan to build the world’s largest photovoltaic electric generating plant. Where would it be, I asked—Arizona? Spain? North Africa? No, it was to be spread among three locations in rural Bavaria, southeast of Nuremberg.
I said there must be some mistake. I grew up not far from that place, just across the border with the Czech Republic, and I will never forget those seemingly endless days of summer spent inside while it rained incessantly. Bavaria is like Seattle in the United States or Sichuan province in China. You don’t want to put a solar plant in Bavaria, but that is exactly where the Germans put it. The plant, with a peak output of 10 megawatts, went into operation in June 2005.
It happened for the best reason there is in politics: money. Welcome to the world of new renewable energies, where the subsidies rule—and consumers pay.
Without these subsidies, renewable energy plants other than hydroelectric and geothermal ones can’t yet compete with conventional generators. There are several reasons, starting with relatively low capacity factors—the most electricity a plant can actually produce divided by what it would produce if it could be run full time. The capacity factor of a typical nuclear power plant is more than 90 percent; for a coal-fired generating plant it’s about 65 to 70 percent. A photovoltaic installation can get close to 20 percent—in sunny Spain—and a wind turbine, well placed on dry land, from 25 to 30 percent. Put it offshore and it may even reach 40 percent. To convert to either of the latter two technologies, you must also figure in the need to string entirely new transmission lines to places where sun and wind abound, as well as the need to manage a more variable system load, due to the intermittent nature of the power.
All of these complications are well known, and all of them have been too lightly dismissed by alternative energy backers and the media. Most egregious of all is the boosters’ failure to recognize the time it takes to convert to any new source of energy, no matter how compelling the arguments for it may be.
An example is the 2008 plan promoted by former vice president Al Gore, which called for replacing all fossil-fueled generation in the United States in just a decade. Another is Google’s plan, announced in 2008 and abandoned in 2011, which envisaged cutting out coal generation by 2030. Trumping them all was a 2009 article in Scientific American by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil engineering at Stanford University, and Mark Delucchi, a researcher in transportation studies at the University of California, Davis. They proposed converting the energy economy of the entire world to renewable sources by 2030.
History and a consideration of the technical requirements show that the problem is much greater than these advocates have supposed.
Read the entire article here.
h/t to WUWT reader “the1pag”
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@michaeljmcfadden:
“..Plus, while a wind turbine isn’t exactly something that birds would have “evolved” to deal with it seems a bit unlikely that birds wouldn’t be able to avoid a steadily moving object while flying.”
I used to think exactly the same way, but evidence shows otherwise and has many examples:
Germany has proven it’s possible with significant production of domestic renewable energy…we’re being left in the dust. Israel is doing it. China is leading in R&D and production. We’ll continue borrowing money from China to fund Oil-Strategy Wars, until we need to borrow from China, to buy from China, to catch up with Germany. Way to Go Team USA!!
John D. says: Pulp Fiction!
July 7, 2012 at 9:20 pm
Doug Proctor says:
The naive idealism is why scientists shouldn’t, in a Wellsian world, rule it. Friction in any theoretical system is zero, and if it isn’t zero today, then with advances in technology, it will be. Real soon.
Sounds like a metric for distinguishing ‘science’ from ‘engineering’ would be needed here.
There are also plenty of cases where friction is essential to the correct operation of a machine 🙂
Roger Sowell says: July 7, 2012 at 8:59 am
I stand corrected, to a significant degree, by your post Roger – thank you.
Economics IS paramount, whereas EROEI is a only useful secondary parameter, to be used with discretion.
There are at least 2 parts to the answer.
1. Rising CO2 (which may be due to human activity, or may be a hundreds+ of years lagged response to sea temperature increase long ago) has boosted agricultural yields significantly this century. Some havoc, right?
2. If emissions (human and natural) shrank significantly, atmospheric CO2 would drop, and your crops would starve. As I’m sure you’re aware, at noon over/in a cornfield, e.g., CO2 is pretty much zero, as is growth. They await some breezes to move new supplies in, and a drop in sunshine, before they can catch up! Personally, I suggest trickle-irrigation with soda water to keep them supplied all day long!! 😉
John D. says:
July 7, 2012 at 9:20 pm
In actual fact, it is we who will be leaving them in the dust, because they have chosen to pursue an uneconomical and inefficient means of providing their power. Well, Germany and other European economies anyway. Israel has recently hit a mother lode of fossil fuels, and will no doubt be taking advantage of it. Formerly, they were driven to find other solutions because they had to get fossil fuels from hostile or, at best, luke-warm trading partners.
Don’t believe all the press release hype. Alternatives have grown in the German mix largely because conventional sources shrank dramatically after they shuttered half their nuclear capacity, and they have done an about face from being a net energy exporter to an energy importer. It will end badly.
Let me share a thought as well: being economically sensible is a huge matter and not so straightforward. Has one ever thought that all fossil fuel generating methods imply a political risk ie the fact that they are not infinite or everywhere and that you get enslaved to your supplier? And yes if you own the fuel (oil, gas, etc) everything is ok, what if not?
This is a very complete and interesting history of oil well production increases through use of nitroglycerine and, eventually, today’s fracking:
http://aoghs.org/technology/shooters-well-fracking-history/
allohm says:
July 8, 2012 at 1:59 pm
“… the fact that they are not infinite…”
Perhaps not infinite, but vast. Enough so that we do not need to punish ourselves in a pell-mell rush to transition to something else. We can take the time to develop optimal alternatives, which solar and wind power are most decidedly not.
“… and that you get enslaved to your supplier?…”
No more than they are enslaved to us – they need our cash and finished goods as much as we need their oil. Besides which, we have plenty of domestic supply, if we choose to develop it. North Dakota is booming with oil development right now. There is more oil locked up in shale in the US than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.
Relax, and let the people whose business it is to bring energy to market do their jobs.
“””””…..Simcoe surfer says:
July 6, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Most birds migrate at night……”””””
I’m sure you can provide us with a reference for that conclusion.
True migratory species travel day and night. In the Sacramento/San Joachin delta portion of the Pacific flyway, migrating flocks can be seen during the season flying overhead at high altitudes. if you have never been standing out on a fishing boat when a flight of thousands of migrating birds goes overhead, and seemingly the whole flock decides to bomb simultaneously, it gets kinda messy, and the water around the boat dances like in a hailstorm.
The wind turbine farm in that delta region also happens to be the habitat for one of the largest assemblages of golden eagles, which hunt rabbits and other varmints in the open rolling pasture lands; and they often fall prey to those turbine blades, which are travelling a good bit faster than those birds can move..
“””””…..
Whether increased atmospheric CO2 is bad or good is yet another question, for which the correct answer may be quite different from the current fashionable fad.
Finally, North America, with its vast tracts of growing forests, is probably a net sink for CO2, not a net source……
Allan MacRae says:
July 7, 2012 at 12:51 pm
P.S. Walter, I also agree with Bart above – I wrote on this subject in 2008……”””””
Well Allan, The USA is indeed a net carbon sink; the only large land carbon sink on earth. You can goggle “A large carbon sink in North America” to find the peer reviewed paper on the subject; and of course it involves more than just the forestry, since old forests tend to be more carbon neutral; other than farmed forests of course. But of course the USA is also the world’s food basket, so we grow a lot of carbon capturing crops. New Zealand too, I am sure is a net carbon sink, but only a small one. Neither of those two countries is allowed to offset their carbon “sources” against their agricultural sinks.
The June 2012 issue of the IEEE Nano-Technology magazine, has an extensive article on nano-tech based possible advanced solar cell technologies.
Authors are Christiana B.Honsberg, and Stephen M Goodnick. It’s a very readable article packed with some good information that should be understandable by anyone who can read SciAm.
They report that single crystal silicon cells have achieved 25% efficiency for single sun air mass 1.5 solar conversion efficiency against a theoretical single band gap limit of 33.7%. The current record for a triple bandgap tandem solar cell is 43.5% out of a limit of 51.5% for triple junctions.
While a theoretical maximum sun concentration (46,300 suns) conversion efficiency of around 87% is thought to be possible with exotic conversion methods; no such postulated alternative architecture (than multi-bandgap tandem stacks) has been implemented and demonstrated to exceed Tandem bandgap cells with their present 43.5% limit. They mention no such example that exceeds the 25% silicon single bandgap record. even.
Evidently the first determination of the thermodynamic limits of solar cell efficiency was derived by W. Shockley andH. J. Quiesser in 1961 ; J Appl Physics, vol 32 no. 3 pp 510-519, 1961.
The basic problem of simple band gap solar cells, is that they don’t convert photon energies less than the band gap energy, and photon energies above the bandgap energy are simply lost as heat, in a manner similar to the Stokes shift loss in phosphor conversion LEDs.
Surprisingly, the nano-tech paper made no mention of the possible recovery of any solar thermal energy from the above bandgap energy losses.
So I don’t know what the real limits of solar energy collection are, if all stops are pulled out. I have no idea whether any of the exotic nano tech architectures can ever be rendered practical. Does sound like a “bring money” call to me. It is possible that the GaN/InGaN technology being worked on by Nakamura’s group at UC Santa Barbara, is one of those exotics, rather than simply a high bandgap part of a tandem stack; but that is just a WAG by me; I have no information to that effect.
Offhand, I don’t know what the surface level air mass one solar insolation.number is. Maybe some giggling expert can locate that number.
“””””…..Todd says:
July 7, 2012 at 9:36 am
There is an assumption, sometimes stated and sometimes unstated, that Solar will get cheaper over time, and will eventually be as cheap as Coal/Gas/Nuclear, …..”””””
The assumption goes something like this; If we just “subsidize” solar PV arrays to “bring the cost down” then people will start using them and due to economies of scale, the increased volume will bring costs down. But it doesn’t work that way.
Solar energy comes in at around 1,000 W/m^2 or 100 W/squ ft. At 20% conversion efficiency, thats 20 W/squ ft at peak sun.
So let’s tax fossil fuels to make them more expensive, and use the tax dollars to subsidize PV solar.
How about $1Meg per barrell of oil or equivalent; that should make fossils very uneconomical.
so you go down to your local solar cell emporium, with your megabuck, and you order 10,000 solar panels whch they had on their ad yesterday for $100 per panel.
“Sheesh !!!” says the solar cell vendor, “too bad you didn’t come in yesterday. Oil was $25 per barrel, and I could make about 6 peak Watts of solar cells out of a barrel of oil’s energy, so I could have sold them to you at around $4 per watt, and at least broke even. But some idiot just raised the price of oil to $1,000,025 per barrel, so now I will have to charge you $166,670.33per Watt, just to break even, because I can still only make 6Watts of cells out of a barrel of oil.
You see the price doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s the technology that sucks, not the economics.
And since the dictators still think it is economics, they will put economists to work on the problem, so the technology problems will never be solved.
I think solar PV may have a future to look forward to for small applications; but you still have to deal with the fact, that you can’t build any structure that would withstand the 100 year storm; even if it does absolutel nothing but sit there, for the cost that is necessary for effective use of valuable real estate. And if you succeed anyway, the property tax collector is going to kill your project when he raises your taxes, for the land improvements.
It’s a lack of technology; not a lack of money.
,
And at Kevin Trenberth’s 341 W/m^2 TSI value, the result is even more dismal.
Sorry, you’re a little late to that particular party. I recall reading in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science 10 or 15 years ago articles on using heat exchangers buried in the ground to temper incoming air for HVAC. One scheme is to sink a well and bring up water and use a heat exchanger to dump to or extract heat from the water and drop it back down. I think the EPA nowadays has some strange objection to the re-injection of the water. The other is to bury pipes 3-4′ below ground, in the constant temperature zone, and extract and reject the heat as before. You can probably find out more at their respective web sites.
I got one. Oxygen is the second most common element in our galaxy. Carbon is the fourth most common element in our galaxy. So, when the second and fourth most common elements combine in our galaxy they are considered illegal and will ruin the earth. I must be STUPID!
What about conservation of energy? When you account for entropy, doesn’t the conversion of energy from one form to another result in no net increase or decrease to the total energy in the system? If so, what will happen if we convert enough wind power, for example, to contribute significantly to the grid? I wonder if there been any environmental impact studies touching on this.