100% Renewable Energy in 40 Years Not Limited to Our Wildest Dreams: Study
fastcompany.com
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Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, the two authors, have been publishing about this topic for more than two years.
Here is the pop science writeup in Scientific American from 2009 (PDF): http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad11...
The considerably wonkier paper, published in Energy Policy this year (two parts, PDFs): http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnP...; http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnP...
Here is a page collecting everything Mark Z. Anderson published or said about the topic: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/susen...
That should hopefully reduce the amount handwaving involved.
Here's a better idea, invest in efficiency. If we insulated buildings properly they wouldn't need any heating/cooling - See passivhaus. If we designed cars properly they'd get 50+mpg already (See europe). If we did things bit by bit to improve efficiency we could easily become energy independent and even an exporter.
Have a look at the rejected energy portion of that graph. The worry isn't creating more energy, it's doing more with what we already have.
1. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/en...
My suspicion is that tweaks on efficiency won’t cut it. They are important, no doubt, but to get anywhere with tweaks on efficiency many changes in many different areas are necessary, there is no centralized solution of getting every American a passive house.
The big flaw of climate change is that it creates no incentives for individuals and businesses to change their behavior. Climate change is a nice example for the tragedy of the commons. My suspicion that tweaks which require many changes in many different areas won’t cut it is somewhat founded on that.
Incentives work wonders if you want all people to do something differently, like renovating their house to add better insulation. Governments could try to create incentives but have generally been unwilling to. It’s also very hard to get incentives right and it is very hard to get them implemented without being overrun by lobbyists. I don’t know why but I somehow arrived at the conclusion that a big infrastructure push by governments with a rather singular focus would have a bigger chance at success.
Can't really be reconciled with
"If we designed cars properly they'd get 50+mpg already"
But, then we'd have to make everyone change every notion of style, hot-rodder fantasy, and living-room comfort that everyone wants out of their galactic-sized vehicles. It might just be easier to sell them on a plug-in than make them give up SUVs for mini eurocars.
What is the total system cost from throwing out an entire nation's infrastructure?
Maybe they are hand-waving a bit, and perhaps the costs are higher than what they are claiming. However, I could see the long-term costs being nowhere near as high as you might imagine. I mean, it's not so much the throwing out of the infrastructure that's expensive. It's replacing it that's really costly.
Current system costs: Fuel + Transport + Transmission + Environmental destruction + 1/3rd of all cancer costs + 1/3rd of every hurricane/flood + 1/3rd of Iraq war etc...
Proposed system costs: Solar plants in Arizona + Wind Generators in Nebraska + Hydro on the mississippi
Somehow I doubt the proposed system is considering the costs of the mines/foundaries for the solar panels, or the dead birds from the windmills, or the destroyed fisheries from the hydro.
Additionally, consider that you still have to transport the electricity if not the fuel, and you lose a lot more on this side of the equation. Transmission losses are significant over distance. You can put a natural gas generator anywhere and it will produce power in a very dense footprint. Specifically when compared with acres of solar panels or windmills. So even if you can produce power at a similar rate it matters where you produce it.
Anyone that's concerned about fossil fuel dependence and CO2 should be campaigning for more nuclear plants. Solar and wind can be used where feasible, but to say they can replace the whole system is overshooting.
Besides all this, lots of the renewable energy sources turn out to require more energy to produce and set up than they are able to recover over the span of decades (like wind farming, which is very costly to mine the materials, ship them out, set up, and get going). The article mentions the fiscal cost of setting up these alternative sources but apparently that's not the only thing standing in the way either.
My point is that this article paints a highly idealistic portrait. We don't have enough time left for that!
That is not to say that this study did not engage in a lot of hand-waving assumptions (the claim that a small fraction of total power that was hydro could cover solar/wind fluctuations for base load is delusional to be point of being outright deceptive) and is light on a practical path from here to there, but if you were to add a nuclear component that was 30-40% of the total I would not find the paper's claims to be completely unreasonable.
So I guess we start building two nukes every day?
Usual solar panels say 1-5 years to generate the energy used to create them and last 20.
The consensus among scientists is that global warming is manmade, if you haven't seen it presented that's a separate issue. Of course making predictions on such large complex systems as our climate is unprecedented, so who knows. There is a variety of models/simulations, some more optimistic than others, then real world data is used to pick the most accurate one. So far the most optimistic models aren't winning.
As you pointed out, the optimistic models not winning, and in fact the outlook from mainstream scientists' models get worse every year. The problem is compounding -- that's how the world works in fact.
I'm so concerned because nobody considers what I'm talking about seriously, and almost everyone easily discards what I say as the ravings of some pseudoscientific, ignorant apocalypse nut. But unfortunately for their social standing, and fortunately for people who are interested in facts, I know what I talk about.
Let's think about this carefully. If the models predicting the changes through emissions are so accurate, why does the outlook get so drastically worse every year? It's because the system that you refer to as our climate in reality also includes gravitational and magnetic factors. This introduces huge oscillating systems. If physics today has no confirmed understanding about the role of the gravity on the climate, and how a gravitational field is maintained, how could they rule out factors that would influence gravity? In fact, there isn't a real understanding of gravity in mainstream physics in the first place. But they discard questions about its influence like they know.
It's extremely concerning to me that so-called scientists are more concerned about being accepted by their peers than about getting the information we need to save our own lives.
Go ahead and downvote, but karma on hacker news is the smallest price to pay if I can find even one person who wants to confirm what I'm talking about.
There used to be more pessimistic models that predicted some linear progression of current warming. So the new mainstream models fit measurements better, mainly because more scientific resources were thrown at the problem. They also predict slower change.
Magnetic fields, shifting magnetic poles, gravity, shifting orbits, solar intensity were all considered, by thousands of scientists writing thousands of papers. If you have something to add then do your own science. Arguments without math, data, models, simulations won't be taken seriously. Extraordinary claims require more evidence.
There might be group think, too many people working on the problem, etc.. but you can't discredit the findings with that argument.