Guest essay by Bjørn Lomborg
Globally, renewables have been *declining* for the last two centuries, and have remained stuck at about 13% for the past 40 years.
People expect them to rise dramatically to 30% by 2035 — the honest answer is that they’re likely to rise a meagre 1.5 percentage points to 14.5%
Actually, the UK set its record for wind power in 1804, when its share reached 2.5% – almost three times its level today!
As Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, put it bluntly:
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and [the] Tooth Fairy.”
We need to get real on renewables. Only if green energy becomes much cheaper — and that requires lots of green R&D — will a renewables transition be possible.
Data for graph: “A brief history of energy” by Roger Fouquet, International Handbook of the Economics of Energy 2009; Warde, Energy consumption in England and Wales, 1560-2000; http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Energy-Production-Statistics#tspQvChart, and EIA data (DOI: 10.1787/enestats-data-en)
Read my new oped on the topic from Project Syndicate:
SAMURAI says:
August 14, 2013 at 6:24 pm
While I’m a fan of LFTRs, I think some of your expectations are overly optimistic, especially the reprocessing to fish out the U233. It’s certainly easier than reprocessing fuel from U235 reactors, but it’s still mucking about with stuff you want to careful with.
> adding Fluoride gas which then converts the uranium tetra fluoride (salt) to uranium hexafluoride (gas),
Fluoride is not a gas, it’s an ion. Fluorine is a gas. Fluorine is also nastier than chlorine, you really don’t want to be anywhere near a fluorine leak.
> Again, a LFTR was built and ran flawlessly for 5 years (1965-1969).
Five reactor years is hardly a safety record, and they shut it down for the weekends. It also wasn’t a 600 MW reactor. Scale up brings many interesting effects.
However, it is certainly a technology that we should have developed. Once the Chinese work out a few of the kinks, it should be a big seller for them. A reverse engineered E-Cat may be the bigger seller though….
> CANDUs are a dead end. They require 70 atmospheres of steam pressure to run….
Umm, if you’re going to run a turbine, what pressure do you want to start with?
> LFTRs don’t require any cooling as the liquid salts naturally maintain a heat range of 400C to 1,600C.
Exactly how do you get 1600°C salt to spin a turbine? There are some challenging engineering properties there! The ORNL reactor never dealt with high pressure, high temperature materials because their goal was to study the reactor, not produce electricity.
Check out http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/part-8-msr-lftr/ . The author seems to down on all forms of nuclear power, but at least he seems to give things a fairly decent analysis.
pat says: August 14, 2013 at 6:42 pm
meanwhile, over at fukushima…
17,000 dead, hundreds of thousands homeless due to the tsunami.
And yet we worry about something that didn’t hurt anyone.
Janice Moore says:
August 14, 2013 at 10:29 pm
If Intelligent Design isn’t on the WUWT banned list, it should be. Too much room to argue, to little space for improving understanding of the world.
My usual disproof of Intelligent Design is “Why, oh why did they put the blood vessels in front of the rods and cones in the retina?”
Roger Sowell says-
“California generated 29.2 percent of its electricity in 2010 by non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel sources”
Lomborg is discussing total primary energy supply, not just electricity supply. As of 2011, California gets around 6% of its primary energy from renewable sources.
Clean, green CA is a renewable energy embarrassment, at less than half of the global average of 13%.
http://ej.iop.org/images/1748-9326/8/1/014038/Full/erl451143f2_online.jpg
Janice Moore says:
August 14, 2013 at 10:29 pm
“DON’T WORRY, EVERYONE, I WON’T KEEP ON DEBATING ID THEORY.
Janice”
I mean no disrespect Janice, but I think that is a subject best-suited for another forum. On matters here, I do often find your commentary thought-provoking. I accept your statement and look forward to your opinions.
Sincerely,
William
Dear Ric Werme,
I respect what you say. If there is a such a ban on talking about ID, I would very much appreciate it if pro-Darwinist Evolutionary Theory comments were also banned. It makes it so hard to just shut up and take it when nearly every DAY someone casually advocates Darwin’s Origin of Species ideas. I hope you can understand me even though you don’t agree with me.
And, believe it or not, I refrain from about 90% of the ID comments I think of! “Not enough, not enough,” I can just hear you say grimly. LOL, okay, okay. I’ll try harder.
Bottom line? It’s A-th-y’s site and I will abide by his rules even if they turn out to be one-sided.
This is such a GREAT SITE! I love coming here.
Thanks, again, Mr. Werme, for all your great tips for formatting (and lots of other tech tips you give us from time to time).
Janice
Here in Australia we have an organisation called Beyond Zero Emissions who have produced a paper claiming we can run the whole of the country on a range of renewable energy systems.
http://media.bze.org.au/ZCA2020_Stationary_Energy_Synopsis_v1.pdf
http://bze.org.au/
Australia basically runs on 18 -20GW of coal baseload power supported at peaks of 25 – 27GW by Hydro and Gas.
They propose we get 60% of our power from Solar thermal power stations running on molten salt to give 24hr operation – that becomes our baseload power……..need I go any further? These guys are in fantasyland yet they continue to get funding, they pat each other on the back and are now telling us we can run a high speed train from Melbourne to Brisbane entirely on this new renewable energy grid they fantasise about.
I got so frustrated by their antics I sent them an email and may I suggest others do the same.
http://bze.org.au/email-team
Here’s what I sent them:
Dear Mr. [McKlenney],
Sigh. I will try to do better at refraining. I would not have even mentioned ID theory, I hope you realized this, but for Mr. Pompous’s slightly grandiose assertions of engineering done by bacteria above.
Perhaps, you read my post to Mr. Werme just above. I do realize that this is no place to debate any issue such as ID. That is much better done in person. Debate by written correspondence is herding cows through a London traffic circle.
Thanks for not being angry with me for my lapse. I’ll try to save my arguing for CAGW matters.
Your ally for Truth in Science,
Janice
Mr. McClennEy — please forgive my misspelling your name. Time to go to bed….z zzzzzzzzz.
Janice Moore says:
August 14, 2013 at 10:58 pm
“Mr. McClennEy — please forgive my misspelling your name.”
If I remember correctly, you are a fellow tarheel. Not to worry, even if I have erred in this regard. Always remember, no one can offend you. Only you can delegate the power to be offended to someone else. One should only rarely choose such an option.
Later,
William
Ric Werme says: August 14, 2013 at 10:39 pm
… My usual disproof of Intelligent Design is “Why, oh why did they put the blood vessels in front of the rods and cones in the retina?”
To save engineering and manufacturing costs. The simple cell layer that holds all the rods and cones together isn’t as transparent as the nerves and blood vessels that feed them. In kitty cats the layer’s even reflective, so it goes behind everything.
If you’re looking for real disproof, try Washington, D.C.
Ric Werme said @ur momisugly August 14, 2013 at 10:39 pm
I rather thought it was a forbidden topic. And I did not intend to invoke it. My remark was quite jocular. There actually is a lot of space for improving understanding of the world. Unfortunately, the debate is too polarised — even worse than climatology.
Your disproof doesn’t work. The designer might be very intelligent, but clinically insane. Or even merely incompetent.
Bob, thanks for those facts on alternative fuels. Can you direct me to a place where I can get a paper with that info in it? I want to hand it to someone who needs something official-looking, not a blog post. Again, thanks.
Janice Moore said @ur momisugly August 14, 2013 at 10:29 pm
Miss/Mrs/Ms [delete whichever is inapplicable] Moore! Afem
No, I will not angrily tell you to do anything though feel free to jump into a lake if that pleases you 🙂 It is after all summertime where you live. It’s entirely probable that I know as much, or more, about evolutionary theories than yourself. I have read very much in this area from Michael Behe, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould through to Simon Conway-Morris. Not to mention Kim Sterleny who rather resembles me, not me him!
The title of my blog: “One Long Argument” is a quote from Ernst Mayr a rather famous evolutionary biologist. If you wish to “educate” me, I may post something you can respond to in the next 24 hours. Any such debate does not belong on Anthony’s blog without a specific invite from him which given his areas of interest is unlikely. I will be more inclined to follow through on this if Dr Roy Spencer had some input. He from all accounts is interested, intelligent and has a wicked sensa yuma!
Mike McMillan said @ur momisugly August 14, 2013 at 11:47 pm
So cephalopods maximised engineering and manufacturing costs?
Not in a heater-type rocket stove, which burns nearly all the smoke:
http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp
http://www.iwilltry.org/b/build-a-rocket-stove-for-home-heating/
“The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building….”
For interest this is only about 7 family cars in volume. Tough job admittedly.
The Pompous Git says… Or he may have an understanding of the entire system that lesser individuals don’t…
Yet this gets us nowhere.
You won’t add light to any topic (ceratinly not renewables) by discussing Intelligent Design. But you will add a lot of heat.
Besides, you don’t need to believe in Intelligent Design to doubt that bacteria designed anything (the comment that originally offended Janice Moore).
That does imply an intelligence in genes that isn’t entirely Darwinian, either.
@ur momisugly rogerknights
Interesting. But it doesn’t seem as versatile as this:
http://www.thermorossi.com/eng/legna_det.php?gruppo=3&padre=1&figlio=2&id=76
Here’s the relevant WUWT paragraph under About –> Policy:
That’s true, but what’s shown there is primarily a cookstove, so it lacks the secondary combustion chamber and side-feed at the bottom that make the heater-type rocket stove so efficient and smokeless, which was the criticism of wood heating that I was responding to. I guess the next step will have to be for rocket stove designers to provide a larger, more convenient surface for cooking.
M Courtney said @ur momisugly August 15, 2013 at 12:33 am
I did not set out to discuss intelligent design, or offend Miss/Mrs/Ms [delete whichever is inapplicable] Moore. She originally stated “Just in case anyone comes toodling along this thread who is ignorant about solar power and how very little it can do….” and I pointed out that solar energy over 2.8 billion years had resulted in a progression from bacteria to humans. That’s a very long way (IMHO) from claiming that bacteria are intelligent, or knew that in 2.8 billion years there were going to be televisions, the Internet and rampant drug-use in China! I would have thought on a blog where science is the order of the day, stating the empirical evidence was… well… uncontroversial!
If you have any evidence that there were no photosynthesizing bacteria on planet Earth 2.8 billion years ago, please share it with us. If you have any evidence that humans do not currently exist, again, please share that evidence!
For the record, I am not an atheist , or a true-believer in god/gods/goddesses/shamans/witches [delete whichever is inapplicable]. Rather, I am an agnostic; I believe there is insufficient evidence to form an opinion. I am not a true-believer in Intelligent Design, nor do I believe the neo-Darwinist account of evolution. Over 30 distinct species of plants randomly discover C4 photosynthesis in the blink of an evolutionary eye? Give me a break!
Just as Dante’s hell has multiple layers: Green hell has multiple layer: There is deficit hell, job loss hell, brown out hell, no change in CO2 emission from the spending on green scams hell, planet is and will cool not warm hell, CO2 increase is beneficial to environment not detrimental hell and so on.
When engineering reality concerning green scams is ignored, lies are told about the ultimate cost of the green scams, lies are told about the green scams scheme’s ability to actually reduce CO2, lies are told about planetary temperature change, lies are told or unintentional consequences are ignored and covered up (the very best example is the food to biofuel scam which will result in people in developing countries starving, food wars, and all the virgin forest on the planet being cut down if the US, China, and India copy the EU): there are consequences.
The consequence is all logic and reason is removed from public policy: Thereby forcing trillions and trillions of dollars to be spent, mandated by government policy on green scams.
The green scam cost will triple or quadruple the cost of electricity if there is actually an attempt to significantly reduce CO2 emissions with ‘green’ scams rather than to just spend money on green scams that do not work.
Green energy is a super duper example of an “Extraordinary Popular Delusion” and “the Madness of Crowds” which will bankrupt Western countries, result in massive job losses, and will result in massive power failures if we mandate CO2 emission cuts, cap CO2 emission, tax CO2, and so on. i.e. Actually attempt to significantly reduce CO2 emissions (say 40% reduction leading to 60% reduction) using green scams rather than spend trillions of dollars on green scams and make no significant change in CO2 emissions.
A minority of fanatic green parties have stopped nuclear in its tracks which will work. Rather than investing research into a scheme which will work, we are wasting trillions of dollars on green schemes that will never work to reduce CO2 emissions (which is not a problem as the world will cool) even if money grew on trees and deficit spending was not going to lead to currency collapse and economic chaos.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21579149-germanys-energiewende-bodes-ill-countrys-european-leadership-tilting-windmills
Problem 1: Massive construction of high voltage power lines are required, including very, very expensive AC to DC and DC to AC convertors for super high voltage long distant lines. 30% of the energy generated is loss in transmission losses.
“The trouble is that most wind and solar power is generated a long way from the parts of the country where the nuclear plants are to be switched off, so new power grids have to be built (see map). Their construction is far behind schedule. On current plans Germany needs more than 4,000km of new transmission lines by 2022, of which less than 300km have been built.”
Problem 2: If storage is not constructed there will massive rotating power outages. Money does not grow on trees. Western countries will go bankrupt if they attempt to construct storage in addition to losing the last manufacturing jobs to Asia.
Comment:
Wind is the go to renewable. Wind illustrates the problems with so called green energy. German wind farms produce power that averages 20% of the nameplate capacity of the wind generators. Unfortunately there are days and times of the day when wind power farms produce 0% and 100%. Wind power is at the cube of the wind speed there hours when wind farms produce from 5% to 30%, from 30% to 90%. Every time wind power varies so called fossil fuel plants must be turned on/off/on/off/on/off to balance the grid. Due to the in efficiencies to turn fossil plants on/off/on/off/on/off there is almost no net reduction in atmospheric CO2, if honest CO2 accounting is done. This is madness. The scheme does significantly reduce CO2 without storage.
Problem 3: Green energy does not reduce significantly reduce CO2 emissions if honest accounting is done. Double the cost of electricity and reduce CO2 emissions by 5% to 10% if storage is not installed.
We need to be reminded what happens in major city when the lights go out. Chaos, crime, back to the stone age.
@ur momisugly rogerknights
One interest in my life that is of primary importance is the cooking and consuming of food accompanied by fermented grapes. I purchased my Bosky cookstove 2nd hand several years before commencing building the house.
Ric asks,
Q: “how do you get 1,600c liquid salts to turn a gas turbine?
A: with a heat exchanger that can heats up an inert gas.
Q: Fluorine is a dangerous gas.
A. Yes, it is, but it’s in a closed system at 1 atmospheric pressure. It’s all about risk management and chemical companies deal with dangerous gases all the time.