in fiscal year 2009, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity gave International Coal Group, Inc. (ICG, Inc.) of Williamsville, IL $1,664,250 for grant number 09-483006. According to the DCEO’s Grant Tracker website, grant number 09-483006 was part of the Coal Competitiveness Program, which “encourages communities and businesses to improve the coal extraction, transportation and utilization systems within Illinois.” This specific grant was for the construction of a new production portal.
Meanwhile, the resolution to repeal the moratorium on further nuclear development has gone to the state assembly.
Why are we subsidizing coal production while obstructing nuclear, the most efficient and powerful means of energy production on earth?
Could it be that coal is a safer and cleaner form of energy? No, because coal has killed more people both directly, as a result of mine disasters, and indirectly, by pollution-induced illness, than any other form of energy, while the 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. have not killed a single civilian in the entire history of the industry in this country.
Could it be, instead, because the coal lobby is one of the most powerful in IL, and because we still have a substantial number of people employed in high-wage, though deadly, jobs as coal miners?
It's time to ask why we are promoting and subsidizing the dirtiest and most lethal form of power generation while obstructing a set of technologies that could extend the fuel cycle for a thousand years by means of more elegant and efficient nuclear technologies, such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. And it is really time to question the wisdom of so-called "renewable" technologies that are diffuse and grid-destabilizing without the backup of fossil fuels like coal. How clean and renewable can the "renewables" really be if they're only reliable with the "backup" of coal and gas, two forms of energy proven dirty, destructive, dangerous, and subject to depletion in the next couple of decades.
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Showing posts with label renewable energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label renewable energy. Show all posts
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Natural Gas Supplies Overstated
The Energy Information Agency, the statistical arm of the U.S. Energy Department, stated that it has been overstating natural gas supplies and is preparing to make substantial revisions in the methodology it uses to calculate supplies of natural gas.
EIA spokesman Gary Long stated that the revision in the methodology used to compile the 914 report, which reports monthly gas production data, will result in "significant downward revisions" in production numbers.
The common belief is that while oil may peak, that we have a nearly-infinite supply of gas and that "peak gas" is not even a remote possibility, thus the current emphasis on converting our auto and truck fleet to gas, which is also essential as a backup for solar and wind power without which these unreliable and intermittent forms of power generation simply won't work. Nolan Hart at Zomba writes:
"We suddenly have over a one hundred year supply of natural gas at current consumption rates and that number has been growing by about one decade more each year since 2005. New discoveries such as the Eagle Ford shale in south Texas are adding trillions more cubic feet to the natural gas inventory. So, peak oil, yes. Peak natural gas, no way"
The italics are mine. We have one hundred years of natural gas at current consumption rates. Now, if we ramp up consumption just 2% a year, then how much do we have? How about a 5% increase, which is very likely? We can roughly figure that a 5% yearly increase in consumption will mean we will use over 50% more per year in 10 years, which obviously means that a 100-year supply will shrink to 20 year supply in about that many years. Now, how much will our consumption increase if we switch to gas for electrical power generation, and if, in ten years, at least half our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks runs on gas?
Considering our heavy dependence on gas as a feedstock for heavy industry, electrical power generation, and most of all, for the chemical fertilizers for the factory farming so despised by the environmentalists, but whose productivity is the only thing standing between our population of 305 million people and major famines, is it provident and sensible to enable the population in the notion that all we have to do is convert our vehicles to gas power, and we'll be able to continue on as we have since WW2?
At this time, natural gas is being touted as the panacea for the energy crisis, and there is a powerful political impetus to increase our gas consumption drastically, especially for generating electricity and powering our fleet of vehicles. It seems easier and more economical to many policy makers to build gas-fired plants to replace polluting coal plants, than nuclear, which are more expensive and employ relatively novel,difficult-to-understand technologies that a significant percentage of the population fear and misunderstand.
And anything is easier than telling our car-crazy population that the Automobile Age is as good as over, and that most of us are going to have to re-arrange our lives rather drastically.
Our lives depend on the ability of our leaders to clear a path through the hype generated by the advocates for various energy source. Most of all, they, and we, need to be able to envision a future in which all our fuel sources could be in decline, including uranium; and devise approaches designed to conserve these fuels and use them as efficiently as possible, while developing technologies that utilize more plentiful fuels whose cycle can be extended for centuries, such as thorium, one of the most plentiful elements on the planet.
EIA spokesman Gary Long stated that the revision in the methodology used to compile the 914 report, which reports monthly gas production data, will result in "significant downward revisions" in production numbers.
The common belief is that while oil may peak, that we have a nearly-infinite supply of gas and that "peak gas" is not even a remote possibility, thus the current emphasis on converting our auto and truck fleet to gas, which is also essential as a backup for solar and wind power without which these unreliable and intermittent forms of power generation simply won't work. Nolan Hart at Zomba writes:
"We suddenly have over a one hundred year supply of natural gas at current consumption rates and that number has been growing by about one decade more each year since 2005. New discoveries such as the Eagle Ford shale in south Texas are adding trillions more cubic feet to the natural gas inventory. So, peak oil, yes. Peak natural gas, no way"
The italics are mine. We have one hundred years of natural gas at current consumption rates. Now, if we ramp up consumption just 2% a year, then how much do we have? How about a 5% increase, which is very likely? We can roughly figure that a 5% yearly increase in consumption will mean we will use over 50% more per year in 10 years, which obviously means that a 100-year supply will shrink to 20 year supply in about that many years. Now, how much will our consumption increase if we switch to gas for electrical power generation, and if, in ten years, at least half our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks runs on gas?
Considering our heavy dependence on gas as a feedstock for heavy industry, electrical power generation, and most of all, for the chemical fertilizers for the factory farming so despised by the environmentalists, but whose productivity is the only thing standing between our population of 305 million people and major famines, is it provident and sensible to enable the population in the notion that all we have to do is convert our vehicles to gas power, and we'll be able to continue on as we have since WW2?
At this time, natural gas is being touted as the panacea for the energy crisis, and there is a powerful political impetus to increase our gas consumption drastically, especially for generating electricity and powering our fleet of vehicles. It seems easier and more economical to many policy makers to build gas-fired plants to replace polluting coal plants, than nuclear, which are more expensive and employ relatively novel,difficult-to-understand technologies that a significant percentage of the population fear and misunderstand.
And anything is easier than telling our car-crazy population that the Automobile Age is as good as over, and that most of us are going to have to re-arrange our lives rather drastically.
Our lives depend on the ability of our leaders to clear a path through the hype generated by the advocates for various energy source. Most of all, they, and we, need to be able to envision a future in which all our fuel sources could be in decline, including uranium; and devise approaches designed to conserve these fuels and use them as efficiently as possible, while developing technologies that utilize more plentiful fuels whose cycle can be extended for centuries, such as thorium, one of the most plentiful elements on the planet.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Will Reducing the Cost of Solar Panels Make Solar Competitive With Fossil and Nuclear Power Generation?
Plastics could slash the cost of solar panels dramatically, says Dr. Yueh-Lin Loo, an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Princeton University. Dr. Loo and her team have developed a new technique for producing electricity-conducting plastics that could replace the extremely rare and costly Indium Tin Oxide that is currently used in solar panels, to conduct electricity.
"Conductive polymers [plastics] have been around for a long time, but processing them to make something useful degraded their ability to conduct electricity," said Yueh-Lin Loo, an associate professor of chemical engineering, who led the Princeton team. "We have figured out how to avoid this trade-off. We can shape the plastics into a useful form while maintaining high conductivity."
There is no question that this development could make solar power much more viable and economical, and the best benefit of all is that it could make production of solar panels possible without the use of a rare and expensive material But will it make it competitive with the highly concentrated energy available only from fossil fuels and nuclear?
That's doubtful, because the improvement in conductivity and efficiency, even by a major increment, will not solve the major problem with solar, which is its dependence on diffuse and intermittent energy. Intermittent energy is not only unreliable in itself, but the major limitation is in the transmission of power generated from a large number of small sources that generate intermittently.Stoneleigh, a major contributor to The Oil Drum and The Automatic Earth, describes the difficulty and vastly multiplied complexity of transmitting power generated in small amounts by large numbers of widely dispersed generators in her post on The Automatic Earth, Renewable Energy: Not in Your Lifetime:
As the power system was designed under a central station model to carry power in one direction only, with high voltage transmission and low voltage distribution, the modifications that would be required to enable two-way traffic, especially at the distribution level, are very substantial. Comprehensive monitoring and two-way communication would be required down to the distribution level, with central control (dispatchability, or at least the power to disconnect) of large numbers of very small generators.
The level of complexity would be vastly higher than the existing system, where there are relatively few generators to control in order to balance supply and demand in real time, and maintain system parameters such a frequency and voltage within acceptable limits.
The image above conveys by analogy the essence of power system frequency control - the easiest parameter to visualize. Frequency must be maintained at a set level by balancing supply and demand over the entire AC system. There are 4 such systems in North America - the east, the west, Texas and Quebec - and each functions as a single giant machine. The trucks in the image are generators and the boulder they tow up the uneven hill represents variable load. The trucks must pull the boulder at an even speed despite the bumps.
For a more accurate representation, one would actually need additional trucks, some moving at the same speed waiting to pick up a line if one should be dropped (spinning reserve) and others parked by the side of the hill (standing reserve). Some of the trucks would have to be able to start the boulder moving again from a standing start if it should stop for any reason (black-start).
We are looking at a world where there would be many more trucks, but each would be much smaller, and some of them would only pull if the wind was blowing or the sun was shining. The difficulty of the task will increase exponentially, and frequency management is only one parameter that must be controlled.
The mismatch between renewable resource potential, load and grid capacity is considerable. Resource potential is often found in areas far from load, where the grid capacity is extremely limited. Developing this potential and attempting to transmit the resulting power with existing infrastructure to where it can be used would involve very high losses. Many rural areas are served by low voltage single phase lines, and the maximum generation size that can be connected under those circumstances is approximately 100kW.
Even where three-phase lines exist, so that larger generators can be connected, carrying the power at low voltage is particularly inefficient, as low voltage means high current, and losses are proportional to the square of the current. Building high-voltage transmission lines to serve relatively small amounts of renewable energy would be an exceptionally expensive and difficult proposition, especially in a capital constrained future.
Renewable energy generation far from load could amount to little more than a money generating scheme, as a premium rate will be paid from the public purse for the time being, but little of the power might reach anywhere it could actually be used.
Difficulties occur when generation proposed would amount to more than 50% of the minimum load on the feeder. At this threshold, special anti-islanding measures are required that add considerable cost to the grid connection. In North America, we have large geographical areas served by a network of long stringy feeders with very low load. Adding much of anything to this system will be very challenging.
"Complexity", of course, means much more money and a complete overhaul and massive expansion of our electrical grid, far beyond what would be needed to supply three or four times as much power from conventional large power plants in order to power our transportation by electricity. It would mean, given our current population distribution, at least 8 times the grid capacity we now possess, not the three or four times current capacity that will be necessary to power all our transportation by electricity. Just meeting the needs of a comprehensive rail system is beyond the current capacity of our frayed grid.
The same limitations would apply to wind generation, another diffuse and intermittent source of energy. What this all means is that solar and wind, even were the costs of the components reduced substantially, will still be extremely expensive and unreliable means of generation, and will still rely upon fossil fuels for backup. They will vastly complicate the transmission requirements and in doing so, cause the costs to ramp up steeply.
And they ultimately rest on a fossil fuel platform, as James Howard Kunstler has pointed out, not only for backup, but for the ingredients in the manufacture and transportation of their components, as does the the nuclear power industry... and fossil fuels of all types- oil, coal, and gas- are depleting, and if we expect to retain any of the benefits of technology going forward, we are going to have to make the most efficient use of our remaining fossil fuel resources possible. In doing so, we will be up against frantic global competition for remaining reserves, escalating costs, and "receding horizons", for as the cost of fossil fuels escalate, so will the cost of building more power generation and upgrading the grid. It will take all the ingenuity of all of our best minds in combination with stringent conservation and the utmost economy in the management and deployment of our resources, to retain a minimal level of comfort and technological amenity in the decades ahead.
In such a context, should we pursue the least efficient forms of energy, those with the lowest EROEI, while spurning the most powerful and concentrated forms, namely nuclear, which is the most concentrated, powerful form of energy available? Can we afford to pursue wind and solar, while turning our backs on the most powerful technology ever devised, that could extend the fuel cycle for millinia while providing ample, cheap electricity for every community in the country? For, for every incremental improvement in "renewable", diffuse, intermittent forms of energy, there is a greater breakthrough in nuclear. We now have available to us many new and proven nuclear technologies that are not only extremely safe and leave almost no "waste", but which will reduce the costs of electricity to below that of coal and gas, two materials prone to rapid depletion.
Unfortunately, the decision as to which form of power generation we will commit investment rests in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, not the "market", and several hundred million American lives depend upon those decisions. Let's hope our leaders choose wisely.
Friday, January 1, 2010
The Hidden Reserves of Gull Island and Other Cornucopian Legends
Stressful times have a way of infusing new life into old superstitions and legends, and sure enough, now that oil prices are making a choppy path back to triple digits and existing elephant fields are showing symptoms of exhaustion, the conspiracy theorists are reviving rumors of vast, untapped supplies of oil, "enough to last two hundred years", or is "bigger than Saudi Arabia".
The two most enduring legends are Gull Island and the Bakken Formation.These two fields were discovered decades ago, and any hopes that these fields could approach the production of Gwaihir or Cantarell have been dashed many times over. The vast reserves simply are not there, but the myth dies hard. A Google search brought up hundreds of articles on each field, and in the case of Gull Island, the conspiracy hacks claim that the U.S. government has conspired to cap these wells and keep secret their existence in order to drive up oil prices. There are many plausible explanations for the shutting in of productive wells by the producer, and it's not difficult to imagine that a producer might wish to put a floor under oil prices, since a temporary glut can drive prices to points below profitability, but it is difficult to imagine a vast government conspiracy to raise oil prices in view of the fact that oil production is heavily subsidized in the U.S. with a vast variety of tax favors and incentives, in order to keep prices artificially low, and current prices are still low enough to render offshore drills and extraction from the Calgary sands prohibitively expensive and risky. Wells are shut in when the energy required to work them exceeds the energy that can be extracted from them, that simple, which is why the tar sands projects have been shut in and the offshore drills are not being done- the cheap, easy sweet crude is mostly gone, and what remains is the stuff that is difficult and expensive to get out of the ground. This means that price of oil must be at a certain level to justify the development of these sources, and when it isn't, they will go untapped.
Every report of fabulous reserves at Gull Island and government conspiracies to keep them from being exploited trace their roots back to Lindsey Williams, a Baptist missionary who published a book in 1980 called The Energy Non-Crisis, which describes the Gull Island field and speculates that it might contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for 200 years; in other words, that it is another "elephant" field. That there are thousands of websites echoing Williams' amazing claims is testament to the resilience of cornucopian myths, for Gull Island has indeed been explored and drilled, but it is not producing anything like the 2 million barrels a day that he claims it is capable of, but more like 4,000 barrels a day at the most from Gull no. 1 and Gull no.2. Gull Island State no. 3, drilled in 1992, was a dry hole. According to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), and by the words of ARCO geologists working at the site, “both the geologic evidence and the small area not yet developed into oil fields around the Gull Island wells preclude the possibility of a giant oil accumulation.”(Petroleum News)
According to Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas, the largest pool at Gull Island has thus far produced 396 million barrels of oil, and has perhaps 164 million remaining- and that is the largest of the pools. Therefore, we are probably talking about 1 billion barrels of oil at the most to be had from this legendary field, which, while respectable, is piddling relative to the truly large fields containing 5 billion barrels or more, let alone the supergiants of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It's difficult to believe that any consortium of industry players or government bureaucrats could keep such a find a secret for longer than it takes to file for the drilling permits. Perhaps it's a matter of public perception; to most people out here, 164M sounds like a lot of oil, and 5 billion is staggering, for most people do not realize that the U.S. rips through 7 billion barrels a year. Nor do they realize that while we once found much greater quantities of oil than the world used, that now the finds are very small relative to global demand, which is growing while new discoveries are smaller and smaller. A recent white paper authored by Dr. Robert Hirsch, Giant Oil Field Decline Rates and Their Influence on World Production, makes it clear that the world's giant fields are in decline and that the decline rate vastly outpaces the rate of new discoveries.
The Bakken Formation, a gigantic formation that is nearly 200,000 square miles in size, was first discovered in 1951 and then abandoned for decades as impossible to work because the petroleum is encased in layers of impermeable dolomite,and is a truly tantalizing find. The formation stretches across three states and provinces, and some geologists speculated that as much as 400 billion barrels of oil might reside in the layers of impermeable shale and dolomite. However, it turns out that, based on current production, that the most the formation can be expected to yield, given current levels of knowledge and technology, is about 4.1 billion barrels. While that is a pretty respectable number, it won't come near meeting our ongoing demand, let alone that of rapidly developing economies in Asia such as China, India, and Indonesia with their huge populations of a billion people or more and rapidly devoping industrial economies.
The cornucopian tales of vast, unlimited resources and conspiracies to price them out of reach to the needy population are matched by the myths of "green" Perpetual Motion machines spun by the fantasists of the Green movement, and the current liberal political regime has bought into them hook, line, and sinker. Environmentalists Amory Lovins and Al Gore, who are the most prominent propagators of the alt-energy myths, have attained almost God-like status among the Green contingent, as well as considerable influence within the Obama administration. The plot line of green fantasies of the unlimited energy that could be realized from solar, wind, and geothermal power is similar to that of the fossil fuel cornucopians. We could, they say, run our cities and transportation entirely on wind, solar, and geothermal were it not for government coddling of the fossil fuel industries and deliberate obstruction of alternative technologies. "Whole cities are run on wind power!" exclaim the fantasists, and they point to such "cities" as tiny Rock Port, Missouri, pop.1300, as examples of the superiority of "renewable" energy. The little hamlet near the Nebraska border has achieved energy independence by means of four wind turbines that cost $90 Million and that generate 5 megawatts a power per day. A closer look reveals that not only is this expensive power -it translates to a minimum .20 cents per kilowatt hour under the best circumstances, but that the system must be tied to the nation-wide grid for backup power when the wind is not blowing. In other words, like solar power, it is reliant upon fossil fuel backups to assure reliable, uninterrupted power generation, thus blasting away fantasies of energy independence from "renewables". Additionally, the Rock Port project is one node of a much larger project in the area, which meant that the turbines cost much less than they would as a "stand alone" project, and the town was, under its previous arrangement, paying a substantial premium for power transmitted from distant places, known as a "wheeling charge", for the line loss involved in transmitting electricity over vast distances, which elevated its power costs significantly. In other words, Rock Port is a special situation, a tiny community in a remote location that has benefited from a convergence of unusual circumstances: the high cost of importing power from remote sources, the loss of other alternatives such as the hydro that used to supply the town, and proximity to a large wind farm and the existence of ideal weather for wind generation, along with a tiny population and copious federal subsidies. Such a combination of factors doesn't set up often, and even so, the town is ultimately reliant upon fossil fuel for its power given the intermittant nature of wind power and the difficulty of storing it.
But no matter how often and convincingly these myths are debunked, they retain their life and their power over a frightened population traumatized by the loss of the industries that made this country, for a time, the wealthiest and most productive nation ever to exist; blindsided by the vicious reversal and revealed fraud of the "growth" economy that seemed invincible just a few years ago, and now confronted with steep, irreversible financial losses and, worse, the permanent loss of our high level of comfort and the terminal depletion of the resources that have made it possible. Right now, we are in denial, which is the first stage of the grieving process, and that denial is manifest in the cornucopian fantasies of government coverups of giant oil finds and suppression of alternative energy sources that could, people believe, make it possible to continue our current obscenely wasteful consumption of resources. Such denial is utterly human and completely understandable.
But it won't help us in the task of reorganizing our economy and communities in keeping with reduced energy imputs and the contraction and eventual loss of industries reliant upon cheap, plentiful lifestyles. We will soon progress to the second stage of the grieving process, which is anger, and millions of people consumed with pain and rage will target the usual scapegoats, which would include our political leaders, who will pay a steep price for pandering to the wish-based fantasies of a population steeped in denial.
However, the steepest price of all will be paid by the 290 million or so "ordinary people", whose failure to reconcile their desires with emerging conditions will set them on a collision course with unpalatable realities, and who will thus be driven into corners defined by no-win choices and who will not have the alternatives available to our financial and political elites.Most of us will not be able to fly off to pristine little communities buried in remote spots, or accumulate vast stockpiles of provisions and ammo in gated compounds guarded by private armies.
And at that point, the "bargaining" stage of the process, we will not be the ones setting the terms of the deal. The hard facts of resource scarcity in combination with a population utterly unprepared to cope with life on terms vastly different than those of the past 70 years will set the terms, and we will have to cope however we can, minus the skills and mentality that could make the difference between life with a certain minimal level of tech amenity in solid communities in an honest, productive economy; and the chaos, scarcity, and rampant violence of a society rapidly devolving into savagery and civil breakdown as its fantasy-driven denizens wander witlessly from place to place in search of illusionary prosperity and safety, and of leaders who will tell them exactly what they want so badly to believe, which is that we can flout the laws of nature and continue to consume vastly more than we produce, whether energy or the goods the energy makes possible.
The two most enduring legends are Gull Island and the Bakken Formation.These two fields were discovered decades ago, and any hopes that these fields could approach the production of Gwaihir or Cantarell have been dashed many times over. The vast reserves simply are not there, but the myth dies hard. A Google search brought up hundreds of articles on each field, and in the case of Gull Island, the conspiracy hacks claim that the U.S. government has conspired to cap these wells and keep secret their existence in order to drive up oil prices. There are many plausible explanations for the shutting in of productive wells by the producer, and it's not difficult to imagine that a producer might wish to put a floor under oil prices, since a temporary glut can drive prices to points below profitability, but it is difficult to imagine a vast government conspiracy to raise oil prices in view of the fact that oil production is heavily subsidized in the U.S. with a vast variety of tax favors and incentives, in order to keep prices artificially low, and current prices are still low enough to render offshore drills and extraction from the Calgary sands prohibitively expensive and risky. Wells are shut in when the energy required to work them exceeds the energy that can be extracted from them, that simple, which is why the tar sands projects have been shut in and the offshore drills are not being done- the cheap, easy sweet crude is mostly gone, and what remains is the stuff that is difficult and expensive to get out of the ground. This means that price of oil must be at a certain level to justify the development of these sources, and when it isn't, they will go untapped.
Every report of fabulous reserves at Gull Island and government conspiracies to keep them from being exploited trace their roots back to Lindsey Williams, a Baptist missionary who published a book in 1980 called The Energy Non-Crisis, which describes the Gull Island field and speculates that it might contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for 200 years; in other words, that it is another "elephant" field. That there are thousands of websites echoing Williams' amazing claims is testament to the resilience of cornucopian myths, for Gull Island has indeed been explored and drilled, but it is not producing anything like the 2 million barrels a day that he claims it is capable of, but more like 4,000 barrels a day at the most from Gull no. 1 and Gull no.2. Gull Island State no. 3, drilled in 1992, was a dry hole. According to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), and by the words of ARCO geologists working at the site, “both the geologic evidence and the small area not yet developed into oil fields around the Gull Island wells preclude the possibility of a giant oil accumulation.”(Petroleum News)
According to Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas, the largest pool at Gull Island has thus far produced 396 million barrels of oil, and has perhaps 164 million remaining- and that is the largest of the pools. Therefore, we are probably talking about 1 billion barrels of oil at the most to be had from this legendary field, which, while respectable, is piddling relative to the truly large fields containing 5 billion barrels or more, let alone the supergiants of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It's difficult to believe that any consortium of industry players or government bureaucrats could keep such a find a secret for longer than it takes to file for the drilling permits. Perhaps it's a matter of public perception; to most people out here, 164M sounds like a lot of oil, and 5 billion is staggering, for most people do not realize that the U.S. rips through 7 billion barrels a year. Nor do they realize that while we once found much greater quantities of oil than the world used, that now the finds are very small relative to global demand, which is growing while new discoveries are smaller and smaller. A recent white paper authored by Dr. Robert Hirsch, Giant Oil Field Decline Rates and Their Influence on World Production, makes it clear that the world's giant fields are in decline and that the decline rate vastly outpaces the rate of new discoveries.
The Bakken Formation, a gigantic formation that is nearly 200,000 square miles in size, was first discovered in 1951 and then abandoned for decades as impossible to work because the petroleum is encased in layers of impermeable dolomite,and is a truly tantalizing find. The formation stretches across three states and provinces, and some geologists speculated that as much as 400 billion barrels of oil might reside in the layers of impermeable shale and dolomite. However, it turns out that, based on current production, that the most the formation can be expected to yield, given current levels of knowledge and technology, is about 4.1 billion barrels. While that is a pretty respectable number, it won't come near meeting our ongoing demand, let alone that of rapidly developing economies in Asia such as China, India, and Indonesia with their huge populations of a billion people or more and rapidly devoping industrial economies.
The cornucopian tales of vast, unlimited resources and conspiracies to price them out of reach to the needy population are matched by the myths of "green" Perpetual Motion machines spun by the fantasists of the Green movement, and the current liberal political regime has bought into them hook, line, and sinker. Environmentalists Amory Lovins and Al Gore, who are the most prominent propagators of the alt-energy myths, have attained almost God-like status among the Green contingent, as well as considerable influence within the Obama administration. The plot line of green fantasies of the unlimited energy that could be realized from solar, wind, and geothermal power is similar to that of the fossil fuel cornucopians. We could, they say, run our cities and transportation entirely on wind, solar, and geothermal were it not for government coddling of the fossil fuel industries and deliberate obstruction of alternative technologies. "Whole cities are run on wind power!" exclaim the fantasists, and they point to such "cities" as tiny Rock Port, Missouri, pop.1300, as examples of the superiority of "renewable" energy. The little hamlet near the Nebraska border has achieved energy independence by means of four wind turbines that cost $90 Million and that generate 5 megawatts a power per day. A closer look reveals that not only is this expensive power -it translates to a minimum .20 cents per kilowatt hour under the best circumstances, but that the system must be tied to the nation-wide grid for backup power when the wind is not blowing. In other words, like solar power, it is reliant upon fossil fuel backups to assure reliable, uninterrupted power generation, thus blasting away fantasies of energy independence from "renewables". Additionally, the Rock Port project is one node of a much larger project in the area, which meant that the turbines cost much less than they would as a "stand alone" project, and the town was, under its previous arrangement, paying a substantial premium for power transmitted from distant places, known as a "wheeling charge", for the line loss involved in transmitting electricity over vast distances, which elevated its power costs significantly. In other words, Rock Port is a special situation, a tiny community in a remote location that has benefited from a convergence of unusual circumstances: the high cost of importing power from remote sources, the loss of other alternatives such as the hydro that used to supply the town, and proximity to a large wind farm and the existence of ideal weather for wind generation, along with a tiny population and copious federal subsidies. Such a combination of factors doesn't set up often, and even so, the town is ultimately reliant upon fossil fuel for its power given the intermittant nature of wind power and the difficulty of storing it.
But no matter how often and convincingly these myths are debunked, they retain their life and their power over a frightened population traumatized by the loss of the industries that made this country, for a time, the wealthiest and most productive nation ever to exist; blindsided by the vicious reversal and revealed fraud of the "growth" economy that seemed invincible just a few years ago, and now confronted with steep, irreversible financial losses and, worse, the permanent loss of our high level of comfort and the terminal depletion of the resources that have made it possible. Right now, we are in denial, which is the first stage of the grieving process, and that denial is manifest in the cornucopian fantasies of government coverups of giant oil finds and suppression of alternative energy sources that could, people believe, make it possible to continue our current obscenely wasteful consumption of resources. Such denial is utterly human and completely understandable.
But it won't help us in the task of reorganizing our economy and communities in keeping with reduced energy imputs and the contraction and eventual loss of industries reliant upon cheap, plentiful lifestyles. We will soon progress to the second stage of the grieving process, which is anger, and millions of people consumed with pain and rage will target the usual scapegoats, which would include our political leaders, who will pay a steep price for pandering to the wish-based fantasies of a population steeped in denial.
However, the steepest price of all will be paid by the 290 million or so "ordinary people", whose failure to reconcile their desires with emerging conditions will set them on a collision course with unpalatable realities, and who will thus be driven into corners defined by no-win choices and who will not have the alternatives available to our financial and political elites.Most of us will not be able to fly off to pristine little communities buried in remote spots, or accumulate vast stockpiles of provisions and ammo in gated compounds guarded by private armies.
And at that point, the "bargaining" stage of the process, we will not be the ones setting the terms of the deal. The hard facts of resource scarcity in combination with a population utterly unprepared to cope with life on terms vastly different than those of the past 70 years will set the terms, and we will have to cope however we can, minus the skills and mentality that could make the difference between life with a certain minimal level of tech amenity in solid communities in an honest, productive economy; and the chaos, scarcity, and rampant violence of a society rapidly devolving into savagery and civil breakdown as its fantasy-driven denizens wander witlessly from place to place in search of illusionary prosperity and safety, and of leaders who will tell them exactly what they want so badly to believe, which is that we can flout the laws of nature and continue to consume vastly more than we produce, whether energy or the goods the energy makes possible.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Renewable Energy: Not in Your Lifetime
Stoneleigh of the Automatic Earth blog has graciously granted me permission to reprint in its entirety her July 1 post, "Renewable Energy: Not in Your Lifetime." I have read hundreds of articles on various forms of renewable or "green" energy generation, including articles in scientific journals, but nothing I have read so clarifies the enormous complexity and technical challenges of energy generation and how extraordinarily challenging, and likely impossible, it will be to integrate the intermittent, diffuse, low-output, low EROEI forms of electrical power generation the Green movement is promoting, with our strained grid and the need for steady, high output. Everyone who has an interest in and a stake in the future of power generation needs to read this short article, which by itself does a better job of illustrating the difficulties in front of us than hundreds of other books and articles combined.
Here is Stoneleigh's view of the future of the electrical grid in connection with "alternative" energy forms such as wind and solar:
"Since it is the major world conundrum with the shortest timescale, I usually focus on finance here, but alternative energy sources and power systems are my day job. Ilargi suggested that, in response to a question about the potential for renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), I write an article on the future of power systems.
With people hanging so many of their hopes on an electric future, it seems timely to inject a dose of reality. This is meant as a cursory overview of some of the difficulties we are facing with regard to electrical power in the future. The extraordinary technical and organizational complexity of power systems is difficult to convey, and there is far more to it than I am attempting to address here.
First off: As we are entering a depression, within a few years hardly anyone will have the money to buy an EV. Second: the grid could not come close to handling the current transportation load even if EVs could become common. An economy based on EV transportation would have to be fueled by base-load nuclear that doesn't currently exist and would take decades to build, and no one builds anything in a depression.
What they do is mount a losing battle to maintain existing infrastructure and hope they don't lose too much before better times return. This depression will last long enough that the infrastructure degradation will be enormous, even without the impact of above ground events resulting from serious societal unrest. Attempts at recovery after deleveraging are going to hit a hard energy ceiling. Power systems are critical to the functioning of a modern economy, but are almost completely taken for granted. That will not be the case in a few short years.
Here in Ontario, Canada (pop.13 million), the provincial government has just passed the Green Energy Act, and renewable energy proponents are queuing up to sign 20-year feed-in tariff contracts for power generation at a premium rate per kWh (varying by technology and reaching a maximum of 80 cents/kWh for small-scale roof-top solar).
The general assumption is that we are well on our way to building a future of renewable energy powered smart grids that will be able to accommodate not only our current demand, but much of our transportation load as well, thanks to EVs.
Unfortunately, much of this techno-positivist vision is nothing but pie-in-the-sky, thanks to the limitations of the electrical grid, as well as the low EROEI of renewable energy, the effect of receding horizons on the prospects for scaling up renewable energy development and the impending deflationary collapse of the money supply.
Investment in grid infrastructure, as with public infrastructure of most other kinds, has been sadly neglected for a long time. Much of the existing grid equipment is at or near the end of its design life, as are many of the power plants we depend on. (For instance, in Ontario we haven't got around to paying for the last set of nuclear power plants we built, that are now approaching the end of design life and have had to be very expensively re-tubed in recent years.
The outstanding debt is some $40 billion, and the debt retirement charge we pay doesn't even cover the interest.) Liberalization in the electricity sector has led to a relentless whittling away of safety margins in many places. Where we once had a system with a great deal of resilience through redundancy, that is generally no longer the case. In North America we now have an aging system with a very limited capacity for accommodating either new generation or new load, and we have great difficulty building any new lines.
As the power system was designed under a central station model to carry power in one direction only, with high voltage transmission and low voltage distribution, the modifications that would be required to enable two-way traffic, especially at the distribution level, are very substantial. Comprehensive monitoring and two-way communication would be required down to the distribution level, with central control (dispatchability, or at least the power to disconnect) of large numbers of very small generators.
The level of complexity would be vastly higher than the existing system, where there are relatively few generators to control in order to balance supply and demand in real time, and maintain system parameters such a frequency and voltage within acceptable limits.
The image above conveys by analogy the essence of power system frequency control - the easiest parameter to visualize. Frequency must be maintained at a set level by balancing supply and demand over the entire AC system. There are 4 such systems in North America - the east, the west, Texas and Quebec - and each functions as a single giant machine. The trucks in the image are generators and the boulder they tow up the uneven hill represents variable load. The trucks must pull the boulder at an even speed despite the bumps.
For a more accurate representation, one would actually need additional trucks, some moving at the same speed waiting to pick up a line if one should be dropped (spinning reserve) and others parked by the side of the hill (standing reserve). Some of the trucks would have to be able to start the boulder moving again from a standing start if it should stop for any reason (black-start).
We are looking at a world where there would be many more trucks, but each would be much smaller, and some of them would only pull if the wind was blowing or the sun was shining. The difficulty of the task will increase exponentially, and frequency management is only one parameter that must be controlled.
The mismatch between renewable resource potential, load and grid capacity is considerable. Resource potential is often found in areas far from load, where the grid capacity is extremely limited. Developing this potential and attempting to transmit the resulting power with existing infrastructure to where it can be used would involve very high losses. Many rural areas are served by low voltage single phase lines, and the maximum generation size that can be connected under those circumstances is approximately 100kW.
Even where three-phase lines exist, so that larger generators can be connected, carrying the power at low voltage is particularly inefficient, as low voltage means high current, and losses are proportional to the square of the current. Building high-voltage transmission lines to serve relatively small amounts of renewable energy would be an exceptionally expensive and difficult proposition, especially in a capital constrained future.
Renewable energy generation far from load could amount to little more than a money generating scheme, as a premium rate will be paid from the public purse for the time being, but little of the power might reach anywhere it could actually be used.
Difficulties occur when generation proposed would amount to more than 50% of the minimum load on the feeder. At this threshold, special anti-islanding measures are required that add considerable cost to the grid connection. In North America, we have large geographical areas served by a network of long stringy feeders with very low load. Adding much of anything to this system will be very challenging.
In much of Europe, where renewable energy penetration is relatively high, the population density is high enough to be served by a three-phase grid composed of relatively short feeders with high loads. Many of the limitations faced by North America simply do not apply in places like Germany, Denmark or the Netherlands. The North American grid has more in common with rural Portugal or the Greek Islands.
In this province alone, the amount of grid construction required in order to connect our renewable potential with load would cost tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars, and it would take decades to build. The cost of building, installing and connecting the necessary power generation equipment would also be enormous, and we would have to maintain at least some of the large plants needed for power system control and ancillary services (rapid load-following adjustments for frequency management, spinning reserve, rapid-response standing reserve, black-start capability, provision of reactive power etc).
This will be difficult as many large plants are due for replacement, large power plants take many years to complete, conventional fuels are depleting and capital will be very limited. While demand destruction will build in a temporary supply cushion, the lack of maintenance and new construction, which will inevitably follow a lack of funds, will take a huge toll in relatively few years.
Far from a future of greater high-tech connectedness under a smart-grid model, where EVs would charge at night and cover both transportation needs and power storage, we are looking at a much more fragmented picture. We are very unlikely to see massive AC grids covering anything like the area they do now, and much less likely to see power carried over large distances.
Rural areas may well be cut off and will have to provide any power they need themselves (yet another example of the core preserving itself at the expense of the periphery). This will mean a drastic cut in demand to a third world level in many rural areas, and may lead to other areas with no power production, and no money to build any, being abandoned completely or reverting to a pioneer lifestyle.
In urban areas, where dispossessed rural people migrate in very hard times, electricity provision in places down on their luck could look more like this picture of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It's a far cry from a neat and tidy high-tech vision of efficiency."
Many thanks to Stoneleigh and The Automatic Earth for this article.
Here is Stoneleigh's view of the future of the electrical grid in connection with "alternative" energy forms such as wind and solar:
"Since it is the major world conundrum with the shortest timescale, I usually focus on finance here, but alternative energy sources and power systems are my day job. Ilargi suggested that, in response to a question about the potential for renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), I write an article on the future of power systems.
With people hanging so many of their hopes on an electric future, it seems timely to inject a dose of reality. This is meant as a cursory overview of some of the difficulties we are facing with regard to electrical power in the future. The extraordinary technical and organizational complexity of power systems is difficult to convey, and there is far more to it than I am attempting to address here.
First off: As we are entering a depression, within a few years hardly anyone will have the money to buy an EV. Second: the grid could not come close to handling the current transportation load even if EVs could become common. An economy based on EV transportation would have to be fueled by base-load nuclear that doesn't currently exist and would take decades to build, and no one builds anything in a depression.
What they do is mount a losing battle to maintain existing infrastructure and hope they don't lose too much before better times return. This depression will last long enough that the infrastructure degradation will be enormous, even without the impact of above ground events resulting from serious societal unrest. Attempts at recovery after deleveraging are going to hit a hard energy ceiling. Power systems are critical to the functioning of a modern economy, but are almost completely taken for granted. That will not be the case in a few short years.
Here in Ontario, Canada (pop.13 million), the provincial government has just passed the Green Energy Act, and renewable energy proponents are queuing up to sign 20-year feed-in tariff contracts for power generation at a premium rate per kWh (varying by technology and reaching a maximum of 80 cents/kWh for small-scale roof-top solar).
The general assumption is that we are well on our way to building a future of renewable energy powered smart grids that will be able to accommodate not only our current demand, but much of our transportation load as well, thanks to EVs.
Unfortunately, much of this techno-positivist vision is nothing but pie-in-the-sky, thanks to the limitations of the electrical grid, as well as the low EROEI of renewable energy, the effect of receding horizons on the prospects for scaling up renewable energy development and the impending deflationary collapse of the money supply.
Investment in grid infrastructure, as with public infrastructure of most other kinds, has been sadly neglected for a long time. Much of the existing grid equipment is at or near the end of its design life, as are many of the power plants we depend on. (For instance, in Ontario we haven't got around to paying for the last set of nuclear power plants we built, that are now approaching the end of design life and have had to be very expensively re-tubed in recent years.
The outstanding debt is some $40 billion, and the debt retirement charge we pay doesn't even cover the interest.) Liberalization in the electricity sector has led to a relentless whittling away of safety margins in many places. Where we once had a system with a great deal of resilience through redundancy, that is generally no longer the case. In North America we now have an aging system with a very limited capacity for accommodating either new generation or new load, and we have great difficulty building any new lines.
As the power system was designed under a central station model to carry power in one direction only, with high voltage transmission and low voltage distribution, the modifications that would be required to enable two-way traffic, especially at the distribution level, are very substantial. Comprehensive monitoring and two-way communication would be required down to the distribution level, with central control (dispatchability, or at least the power to disconnect) of large numbers of very small generators.
The level of complexity would be vastly higher than the existing system, where there are relatively few generators to control in order to balance supply and demand in real time, and maintain system parameters such a frequency and voltage within acceptable limits.
The image above conveys by analogy the essence of power system frequency control - the easiest parameter to visualize. Frequency must be maintained at a set level by balancing supply and demand over the entire AC system. There are 4 such systems in North America - the east, the west, Texas and Quebec - and each functions as a single giant machine. The trucks in the image are generators and the boulder they tow up the uneven hill represents variable load. The trucks must pull the boulder at an even speed despite the bumps.
For a more accurate representation, one would actually need additional trucks, some moving at the same speed waiting to pick up a line if one should be dropped (spinning reserve) and others parked by the side of the hill (standing reserve). Some of the trucks would have to be able to start the boulder moving again from a standing start if it should stop for any reason (black-start).
We are looking at a world where there would be many more trucks, but each would be much smaller, and some of them would only pull if the wind was blowing or the sun was shining. The difficulty of the task will increase exponentially, and frequency management is only one parameter that must be controlled.
The mismatch between renewable resource potential, load and grid capacity is considerable. Resource potential is often found in areas far from load, where the grid capacity is extremely limited. Developing this potential and attempting to transmit the resulting power with existing infrastructure to where it can be used would involve very high losses. Many rural areas are served by low voltage single phase lines, and the maximum generation size that can be connected under those circumstances is approximately 100kW.
Even where three-phase lines exist, so that larger generators can be connected, carrying the power at low voltage is particularly inefficient, as low voltage means high current, and losses are proportional to the square of the current. Building high-voltage transmission lines to serve relatively small amounts of renewable energy would be an exceptionally expensive and difficult proposition, especially in a capital constrained future.
Renewable energy generation far from load could amount to little more than a money generating scheme, as a premium rate will be paid from the public purse for the time being, but little of the power might reach anywhere it could actually be used.
Difficulties occur when generation proposed would amount to more than 50% of the minimum load on the feeder. At this threshold, special anti-islanding measures are required that add considerable cost to the grid connection. In North America, we have large geographical areas served by a network of long stringy feeders with very low load. Adding much of anything to this system will be very challenging.
In much of Europe, where renewable energy penetration is relatively high, the population density is high enough to be served by a three-phase grid composed of relatively short feeders with high loads. Many of the limitations faced by North America simply do not apply in places like Germany, Denmark or the Netherlands. The North American grid has more in common with rural Portugal or the Greek Islands.
In this province alone, the amount of grid construction required in order to connect our renewable potential with load would cost tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars, and it would take decades to build. The cost of building, installing and connecting the necessary power generation equipment would also be enormous, and we would have to maintain at least some of the large plants needed for power system control and ancillary services (rapid load-following adjustments for frequency management, spinning reserve, rapid-response standing reserve, black-start capability, provision of reactive power etc).
This will be difficult as many large plants are due for replacement, large power plants take many years to complete, conventional fuels are depleting and capital will be very limited. While demand destruction will build in a temporary supply cushion, the lack of maintenance and new construction, which will inevitably follow a lack of funds, will take a huge toll in relatively few years.
Far from a future of greater high-tech connectedness under a smart-grid model, where EVs would charge at night and cover both transportation needs and power storage, we are looking at a much more fragmented picture. We are very unlikely to see massive AC grids covering anything like the area they do now, and much less likely to see power carried over large distances. Rural areas may well be cut off and will have to provide any power they need themselves (yet another example of the core preserving itself at the expense of the periphery). This will mean a drastic cut in demand to a third world level in many rural areas, and may lead to other areas with no power production, and no money to build any, being abandoned completely or reverting to a pioneer lifestyle.
In urban areas, where dispossessed rural people migrate in very hard times, electricity provision in places down on their luck could look more like this picture of a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It's a far cry from a neat and tidy high-tech vision of efficiency."
Many thanks to Stoneleigh and The Automatic Earth for this article.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Greenpeace Co-Founder Endorses Nuclear Power
It's refreshing to see signs of rationality among the members of the Green movement, as some of the more humane, astute, and reality-oriented among them are beginning to realize that, while renewables have a great deal of promise and are often fine solutions in a few limited applications, we cannot rely upon them in their current state of development for more than a fraction of our power needs.
Recently, a prominent member of the Green movement, endorsed the development of nuclear power.
Dr. Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder and current Co-Chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy), addressed a joint committee in the Wisconsin State Legislature early in April, and advocated the repeal of the Wisconsin moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants.
Dr. Moore stated that, "Nuclear energy is essential to an environmentally sound energy future. Nuclear is the only source that can power the nation without polluting the nation. The round-the-clock baseload production of nuclear energy can power our homes and businesses while creating high paying jobs that cannot be shipped overseas, all without polluting our air and lungs."
Recently, a prominent member of the Green movement, endorsed the development of nuclear power.
Dr. Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder and current Co-Chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy), addressed a joint committee in the Wisconsin State Legislature early in April, and advocated the repeal of the Wisconsin moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants.
Dr. Moore stated that, "Nuclear energy is essential to an environmentally sound energy future. Nuclear is the only source that can power the nation without polluting the nation. The round-the-clock baseload production of nuclear energy can power our homes and businesses while creating high paying jobs that cannot be shipped overseas, all without polluting our air and lungs."
Sunday, May 3, 2009
A Tragic Scam
The Obama administration is moving aggressively on its stated plans to implement various forms of renewable energy, and there are indications that massive changes in energy policy are being made without carefully considering potential costs......such as the lives of 300 million or so American citizens.
The urgency is understandable. At this point in time, oil production has most likely peaked, at least according to prominent oil geologists Kenneth Deffeyes and Colin Campbell, and gas supplies on this continent will reach their production peak at some point in the future. It's hard to determine exactly when, but a major jump in demand for natural gas will surely cause that resource to deplete rapidly. Worse, U.S. has made almost no provisions for lower energy consumption or for alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.
Unfortunately, we are engaged in a frantic struggle to pretend that we can manage a steep reduction of consumption of fossil fuels with absolutely no alteration of our habits or living arrangement whatsoever, and this pretense is driving our policy decisions, with results that will echo and amplify down through decades. Whether or not we will even have reliable electric power will depend on policies implemented right now, given the power of the government to impose broad policies and fund them lavishly, at the expense of the taxpayers. It is unfortunate that this country tipped into to total statism and has erected massive barriers to the individual initiatives and adjustments that could produce appropriate adjustments on a small, local scale, but we have to deal with things as they are.
When the feds decide to implement a program, it is done decisively, and broadly. Unfortunately, it is also done without due consideration of the costs involved, and least of all to unintended consequences. Worse, once a particular policy is in place, we seem unable to reverse it, or correct its more pernicious effects. The disastrous unintended consequences of programs put into place 40, 50, 75 years ago are still cascading through the system, producing the same disastrous results, only vastly amplified, and foreclosing the very actions and adjustments that otherwise might correct the distortions and massive misallocations of resources resulting.
And, just as we have been unable to control or reverse the destruction of our cities, the metastatic spread of suburban sprawl, or the overpaving of our landscape and our inflexible demand for outrageous quantities of fossil fuels that are the end results of the well-intended programs of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, we will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to control or reverse the end results of the energy policies of the Obama administration.
Therefore, it is deeply unsettling to read the broadside statements of Jon Wellinghoff, Chief of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in which he states that no new coal or nuclear plants may ever be needed in the U.S. and that "renewables" such as wind and solar will fill the gap. Wellinghoff's statement is stunningly irresponsible given the energy demands of our current systems and the realities of solar, wind, biomass, and other "renewable" forms of energy generation as they are currently known. Notice that he is not promoting the development of wind and solar alongside nuclear, but is suggesting that we abandon all research and development of nuclear and coal in favor of solar, wind, biomass, and other renewable energy sources. Given Mr. Wellinghoff's position, we can safely assume that he will be driving energy policy going forward and that his priorities will be translated into rigid policies that will drive all development of energy sources during this administration, which is a very chilling thought.
As of this date, there is only the remote possibility that solar and wind can even fractionally fill in the yawning gap between supply and demand that will be left when oil, and later, gas supplies go into terminal decline. While solar and wind technologies may have great potential for large-scale power generation, they are at this stage of development creaky, unreliable, and intermittent sources of power that are extremely reliant upon the local weather conditions, and bear hidden costs that haven't been discussed, such as the vast amounts of land necessary for a solar array or wind farm capable of generating even a significant fraction of the power of a typical coal or nuclear plant, or the amount of water a solar plant consumes, which is a major issue in the critically water-short desert states that are the most advantageous locations for a large solar array.
The ethanol bubble has already burst. "A tragic scam,"energy analyst Matthew Simmons called ethanol and biomass, for it has become painfully obvious that a diversion of our diminishing farmland from food production to fuel production, in the amounts needed to produce enough fuel to run even a substantial fraction of our fleet of 200 million autos and trucks, would collapse our food supply and subject us to critical shortages of food that are usually referred to as famines. Yet the current administration is still emphasizing biomass and ethanol development.
None of this is to say that development of renewables should be abandoned in favor of coal and nuclear. Wind, solar, and geothermal need to be aggressively explored and developed, for nuclear is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and every technology that could supply power needs to be developed.
However, to baldly state that renewable energy can completely replace fossil fuels flies in the face of everything we know to be the case concerning the necessities of power generation. We know, for example, that while demand has dropped somewhat due to the economic situation, that we still have an inflexible demand-demand built into the systems we need to run our economy and our lives for massive amounts of power, and that that demand is barely being met by our existing generating capacity. We also know that demand will surely increase, for our population is still unfortunately growing at the rate of 5% a year. We know also that we will need to electrify our transportation if we want to have any, and that alone will cause demand to ramp up steeply. We also know that our existing fleet of nuclear plants is aging rapidly and will need to be replaced very soon just to keep up with current demand, and we know that the cost of coal in air pollution can't be borne much longer.
Wellinghoff and his confreres in the Green movement are perpetrating a scam- a tragic scam-in their insistance that we can run our systems or any significant fraction thereof on "renewables" while still maintaining anything like current levels of consumption. These people have no excuse for not knowing that a major shift to renewable technologies will have to entail a major cut back in consumption, and that is not possible at this point, nor will it be possible at all if we continue to foster the delusion that we can maintain current levels of consumption, let alone increase them, strictly by means of renewable energy sources.
In coming years, as the oil supply problems setting up right now start to bite with a vengeance, we will need every alternative technology devised, including renewables, in addition to stringent conservation and the complete rearranging of our lives, to retain current levels of comfort and amenity. At this date, nuclear power offers our only hope of generating power sufficient for our current and future needs while reducing carbon emissions and toxic pollution. It would be criminal not to explore promising new nuclear technologies that offer much safer generation with new fuels whose supplies can be extended far past the time when Uranium 235 will be depleted, and failure to develop these technologies would be a tragic mistake that would almost surely result in the U.S. becoming another third-world country within 20 years.
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