From Stanford University , along with actor/activist Mark Ruffalo, and “Gasland” movie fabricator Josh Fox. I’m amazed the university would allow themselves to get used by these clowns. The website they are pushing actually doesn’t offer any solutions, but asks you to “Join the Movement”
Stanford scientist to unveil 50-state plan to transform US to renewable energy
Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson and his colleagues recently developed detailed plans to transform the energy infrastructure of New York, California and Washington states from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable resources by 2050. On Feb. 15, Jacobson presented a new roadmap to renewable energy for all 50 states at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago.
The online interactive roadmap is tailored to maximize the resource potential of each state. Hovering a cursor over California, for example, reveals that the Golden State can meet virtually all of its power demands (transportation, electricity, heating, etc.) in 2050 by switching to a clean technology portfolio that is 55 percent solar, 35 percent wind (on- and offshore), 5 percent geothermal and 4 percent hydroelectric.
“The new roadmap is designed to provide each state a first step toward a renewable future,” said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. “It provides all of the basic information, such as how many wind turbines and solar panels would be needed to power each state, how much land area would be required, what would be the cost and cost savings, how many jobs would be created, how much pollution-related mortality and global-warming emissions would be avoided.”
The 50-state roadmap will be launched this week on the website of The Solutions Project, a national outreach effort led by Jacobson, actor Mark Ruffalo (co-star of The Avengers), film director Josh Fox and others to raise public awareness about switching to clean energy produced entirely by wind, water and sunlight. Also on Feb. 15, Solutions Project member Leilani Munter, a professional racecar driver, will publicize the 50-state plan at a Daytona National Speedway racing event in Daytona, Fla., in which she will be participating.
“Global warming, air pollution and energy insecurity are three of the most significant problems facing the world today, said Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy. “Unfortunately, scientific results are often glossed over. The Solutions Project was born with the vision of combining science with business, policy, and public outreach through social media and cultural leaders – often artists and entertainers who can get the information out – to study and simultaneously address these global challenges.”
Jacobson delivered his AAAS talk on Saturday, Feb. 15, at 1:30 p.m. CT, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Columbus Hall CD, as part of a symposium entitled, “Is it possible to reduce 80% of greenhouse gas emissions from energy by 2050?”
Relevant URLs:
Jacobson Lab
https://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/
The Solutions Project
http://thesolutionsproject.org/
When the Stanford campus and all of their professional staff go completely solar, then I will buy in. I doubt the climate in the SF Bay area is all that conducive to solar energy. And can you imagine that population allowing offshore wind farms? Not likely. Perhaps the windmills could be located near the Redwoods?
If only they would allow a little reality to dribble into their brains. I would love to believe in all of their fairytales, but I am just a bit too practical for that.
Adding to my 9:10 AM posting above, I followed links above and found:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/offshore-wind-farms-could-protect-cities-from-hurricanes-16813
The article is mud. It suggests Jacobson was considering 70,000 turbines (300 Gigawatts total) which could be 1/5 of a ballpark hurricane, if the hurricane cooperated in hitting all 70,000 nice and square. And then there is this out of the blue comment:
“1.5 billion turbines would reduce wind speeds worldwide by 50 percent,” Jacobson said.
Isn’t that one turbine for every five persons on earth! Must be bad reporting?
Oh – then it says: “Jacobson did not address the feasibility…..”
I guess that explains it all !
@Stephen Fisher Rasey at 12:30 P.M.
The Air Products station was leased from Air Products and was located at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority’s Ceron facility at 3990 Zanker Road, San Jose, Ca ca. 2005. It received liquid hydrogen and dispensed compressed hydrogen. From the report:
As for energy efficiency losses associated with hydrogen generation, liquefaction and storage, these reports don’t go into that. It is my understanding that virtually all hydrogen available today is produced from natural gas (methane), so it is still fossil fuel based.
As for the 40% less energy that is being claimed, I assume that you are referring to statements like these (from the November 2009 SciAm article) :
That statement is misleading because it is comparing apples to oranges and magnifying the differences. It is true that the thermal efficiency of gasoline engines is low, but it is considerably higher now than the 17% to 20% that is being quoted. I think modern engines are in the high 20s to low 30s. Diesel engines (which they hate) are in the high 30s to low 40s, for over the road engines. Ship engines, such as the giant Wärtsilä-Sulzer diesels, have a thermal efficiency over 50%, which is close to the Carnot cycle efficiency of about 60%, IIRC.
However, I am not sure if the 75% to 86% efficiency they are quoting for electricity for transportation includes the generation of electricity or the hydrolysis/liquefaction/compression costs of generating hydrogen. IIRC, photo-voltaic panels have an efficiency in the high teens to low 20s and wind turbines I think are much worse. With hydro, you can pretty much put close to 100% of the working fluid (water) through a turbine to generate electricity, but it is very difficult to dam the working fluid (air) in wind power, with the result that very little of the working fluid (air) actually goes through a turbine. You just cannot cover anywhere close to a decent percentage of the wind flowing over a given spot of land with propellers. Think of an area a few miles long, plus a thousand or more feet high and how much of that can be swept by a line of giant turbines. They also are not counting electrical transmission losses, which can be 25% or more depending on distance.
CO2 can be liquefied/compressed at manageable expense, but hydrogen liquefies at much lower temperatures and much higher pressures. I would expect the generation/liquefaction/compression losses to be significant. When you get right down to it, I don’t see the savings. Real world figures are often very different from the Pixi dust these people are getting high on.
The biggest problem, however, is the technological ignorance. Here is another quote from the 2009 SciAm article:
I doubt there is any neodymium in the gearboxes. There may be trace amounts in the alloys (I am not a metallurgist), but neodymium would be used for the magnets on the generator. At one time a magazine like SciAm would never have made a mistake like this, but those days are long gone. Our society is being destroyed by ignorance. It reminds me of what I was told once about the Cubans after the revolution. They supposedly imported a bunch of new machinery for the sugar industry, as sugar in the 1960s was the principal export, but they didn’t realize the machinery was for beet sugar instead of sugarcane. Sigh.
@Gail Combs on Feb. 17 at 1:00 pm:
IIRC, it only took an estimated 400kg to 1000kg of hydrogen to reduce the enormous buildings housing the reactors at Fukushima to rubble. The columns at the top I believe were about 1m by 1.5m in section and may have had rebars of 3/4in to 1in as reinforcement and they were snapped like twigs by air pressure alone. It would only take one explosion taking out half a city block and killing tens or hundreds for hydrogen cars to be banned completely. Can you imagine letting them into a tunnel?
john says: @ur momisugly February 17, 2014 at 2:45 pm
I would gladly give them Washington, New York and California if tHey would leave the rest of us ALONE
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Just move them all to California then donate California to Mexico….
Phil says: @ur momisugly February 17, 2014 at 3:53 pm
…..It would only take one explosion taking out half a city block and killing tens or hundreds for hydrogen cars to be banned completely. Can you imagine letting them into a tunnel?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No with me anywhere near by!
What bugs the heck out of me is this information is KNOWN.
And then there is this:
Very few here seem to be supporting Stanford. But, consider the facts:
1) Stanford supports AGW.
2) Stanford accepts no GOV funding beyond 14.5 billion $, except on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
3) Stanford cannot be sued for liable due to protection of numerous endangered species.
4) Stanford spelled backwards is “drof nats”.
There you go….
Here in Logan, Utah we have a dedicated little group known as RECAB (Renewable Energy and Conservation Advisory Board). The board is mostly academics determined to jump on the latest renewable energy fashion of creating a “roadmap”. The trouble with following fashion is just about the time you get your clothing fashionably short, longer fashions come back in style and you are forced to re-bye the entire wardrobe.
Our friends are going to have to double the number of turbines they use just based on the capacity factor. It is tough to dig the information out. First I started with:
Jacobson and Delucchi (2010)
Table 4 says that 3.8 million 5 MW wind turbines are needed to provide 50% of the 2030 power needed worldwide. It says it is “Derived from appendix A of Jacobson (2009).”
Jacobson (2009) in turn says: “Electronic supplementary Information (ESI) available: …”
I found it here.
On page 2, under Wind Turbine Characteristics, they list the following as the numbers used to get their answers:
Turbine Capacity Factor: 42.46% (low case) 29.41% (high case)
Lifetime of wind turbine (yr): 30
Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, … ROTFL, etc.
I calculated the actual capacity factor for wind from the German 2013 Solar and Wind report as 16.57%.
Real turbine lifetimes (before major refurbishment such as a gearbox change which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and puts the turbine out of service for probably months): 5-7 years.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
They are high on Pixi dust.
They use a leakage rate for wind-hydrogen fuel cell vehicles of 3%.
Compare to actual experience in Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority of 50% losses with boil-off issues and CUTE of 5% to 10% losses at best without boil-off.
Gail Combs says:
February 17, 2014 at 11:37 am
“DirkH says:
February 17, 2014 at 9:45 am
….Moore-type Laws only work in information technologies….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Doesn’t keep the eco-nuts from trying to use it. I have certainly seen it used probably in comments at the Grauniad or Huff’nPuff.”
I know that you know. Just wanted to repeat it for visitors of this thread.
Here is the final technical report for the liquid hydrogen fueled Cryoplane. A medium range aircraft would have to carry between 8 and 12 tons of liquid hydrogen at some 250 degrees C below zero. What the effect would be if a fully fuelled cyroplane were to crash at high speeds is unknown. The safety discussions center around the Hindenburg, which is not comparable. They think that the chances of a detonation are slim, but there’s nothing like crashing one for real.
@Phil at 10:31 pm
RE: Cryoplane.
One of my heroes is Kelly Johnson, Director of Lockheed Skunkworks and Chief Designer for the P-48, the F-104, the U-2 and the A-12/SR-71.
Think of the technological challenges of the SR-71. Titanium body, when people didn’t know how to work with titanium. JP-8, a new high temp fuel. Shock-cone compression, ram-jet bypass turbofan. And stealthy — so secret was it’s stealth that the Air Force didn’t realize Lockheed had stealth experience and should be included in the Pave Blue program.
I mention this because in Kelly biography, he recounts that after the A-12 program, the Air Force came to him with a proposal for a LH2 plane for Mach 5. Kelly worked on it for about 6 months, figured it would be about the size of a football field because LH2 is bulky. He then returned the balance of the program funds back to the Air Force.
LH2 passenger jets wouldn’t be as much a stretch, but LH2 jet engines would likely be a different breed from what we have with JP4.
Only nuclear power would make a hydrogen fuel economy viable. The losses are otherwise too great to tolerate. An advantage of the nuclear / LH2 combination is LH2 would support delivery of electricity by superconducting properties of ordinary materials at 10 K. Such a system would also protect us from many effects of EMP.
The Stanford plan for California is preposterous. There is no way to make the renewable plan work. For one, almost all of the wind turbines would have to be placed off shore because the CA Energy Commission has already mapped the locations of class 5 wind speeds required for wind turbine operation. There is not enough area on land to do the job.
Wind turbines need 80 acres each to avoid fratricide when they throw blade pieces weighing tons up to one half mile upon failure. Coupled with a very poor 30% capacity factor (being generous), the scale required would be on the order of tens of thousands of turbines covering thousands of square miles of ocean.
They can’t be built (literally – not 100,000 more or less) or operated (practically or economically). It’s a plan dead already. Any physics undergraduate should be able to work the numbers.
@ur momisugly Stephen Rasey at 11:01 pm:
Agreed. When you think of the effect that this one man, Kelly Johnson, had on intelligence gathering during the Cold War for decades, he is poorly honored. He belongs in the pantheon of the all time great Americans. He provided the US a technological advantage that was decades ahead of its time and for which there was no counter. They were able to shoot down a U-2, but never an SR-71.
Further please consider the unintended consequences of all those wind turbines. Each one is extracting a tangible amount of energy from the pool of global wind energy. What happens to weather patterns “downstream” from them?
Just as everyone removing water from a river has some effect on all the water users downstream, so the wind farms may have a very serious impact on not just the wind turbines downstream but also may have drastic, but as yet unknowable(?) effects on weather.
Anyone know if any studies have been made on possible consequences of mega-wind farms?
My plan for the USA States is much simpler, and I
absolutely guarantee that this will be 100% effective.
Add a biodegradable Green Dye to all liquid fuels,
and send electricity down wires covered in green
insulation, and add copper ions to all combustible
gasses, and then we shall have what is desirous.
“Green” fuels in every walk of life across the Globe !
No changes will be necessary to existing transport
or heating technologies whatsoever, except that
the operators will then all have supercilious grins.
RE: Liquid Hydrogen and energy loss.
I found a piece that said that 30% of the energy in a volume of liquid hydrogen is needed to liquefy it. I lost the link.
Wikipedia says: “Liquid hydrogen has less energy density by volume than hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline by approximately a factor of four. ” Which is why a LH2 airplane will never be practical. In addition to the bulk density of the fuel, the tanks require much insulation. It would do to have the wings ice up. The link Phil gave to a 2000 Airbus LH2 study had some comical configurations, such as 1/2 the passenger compartment of a traditional A330 jet replaced with LH2 tanks. A hydrogen economy could work, but some transportation fuels would need to be converted to methanol to make them practical and easier handling.
kenin (February 17, 2014 at 11:37 am) “there is no clean energy from water. To dam a beautiful free flowing river is one of the most destructive things you can do.”
Your examples (Quebec) might be valid. However there is nothing I would like more than a “destructive” dam on the “beautiful” river below my house. Since I live on a steep edge and there is a steep edge diagonally across from me, I would be upstream, or have the dam on my property. I have no problem with giving up land for the dam. I would also obviously lose flood plain but the benefits would be enormous. First, I would not be subjected to ridiculous floods (as high as 30 feet above low water) that wipe out everything. Second, I would have vastly improved recreation. Third I would have vastly improved fishing. I don’t even care about the energy although I recognize that would be a huge benefit to my neighbors.
Thanks to eco freaks and some genuinely valid criticism, my dream will never happen. But let’s at least try not to make blanket statements about damming since every case is unique.
I appreciate your statement, although I don’t understand it. Your simply talking about how it benefits you; in my statement, the examples I pointed would clearly effect everyone… and not for the better.
And here in Canada, the only people who benefit are big industry(diamond) and a de-facto government that eventually sells the energy to the U.S
I wonder what millions of displaced people along Chinas rivers would think.
And for the record, just to clarify that I personally am not an eco-freak. I would like to think that i’m a reasonable and rational man that takes everything into consideration.
kenin, there would be net benefits in the my case, not just to me personally. You simply cannot make a blanket claim that net benefits for dams are negative in all cases. The dividing line may well be size. In China there are probably a lot of net positive dams that are much smaller than 3 Gorges and in the case of that dam I have not seen a even-handed evaluation.
kenin:
In support of your opposition to dams which provide cheap, efficient and reliable hydropower, at February 18, 2014 at 8:26 am you say
Obviously, there will be many views about anything among “millions” of people. But the bulk of the displaced persons will probably appreciate their improved housing and the benefits they gain from obtaining electricity.
China is also building coal-fired and nuclear power stations, but hydropower is very competitive with them.
The Hoover Dam in the US was hailed as a great achievement for very good reasons.
Richard
FTR kenin, I never intended to place you in the eco-freak category, but I did not agree with your apparent blanket claim earlier in the thread.
richardscourtney, I should have avoided making generalizations myself. I didn’t give it too much thought, but speculated that large dams might be worse than small ones. At that point I had not read your comment about the Hoover dam which is obviously both large and beneficial.