Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust
wired.com
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As with technology, you have to be able to do more with less. Alternative energy has to be cheaper. And until it is cheaper, it's going to be very hard to get it to work. If you had Amazon as a computer company- if you had said in '96, "Yeah it's gonna cost twice as much to buy a book and it'll take you 6 months to get it, but we're going to get subsidies that are really big and that will make the business work and that's why you should invest." That would be quite difficult to work.
Cleaner energy sources will take off eventually, but not until they're economically competitive with coal.
Coal plants are already failing this test: http://www.theithacajournal.com/article/20120103/NEWS01/2010...
It's called nuclear power.
All things considered, it's probably still a much better bet than fossil fuels, and probably still a worse bet than renewables like solar and wind.
[0] http://www.wse.ie/articles/how-much-wind-energy/index.php
As with the other poster: just how disaster-proof do you expect something to be?
Coal and natural gas may have a constant payout that remains relatively low, rare, and random, perhaps a uniform distribution, and it's average value may be bigger than the distribution of nuclear.
But the issue with nuclear is that its distribution might look like an enormous Dirac Delta function, and when it hits, it takes out many people even wiping out entire communities, if not regions, for hundreds of years.
As a species we are probably used to hearing and feeling badly about the random ape being struck by lightning or forgetting to tend his fire and burning his tree down and being able to move on.
But when we find an entire village is suddenly gone, their part of the forest gone, and strange unknown diseases attack us when we move through the now forbidden zones, we feel differently.
Similarly, Fujinuma dam broke on March 11, 2011 due to the same disaster, resulting in several deaths and lots of additional destruction. Does that get tallied against the hazards of hydroelectric power or against the hazards of enormously powerful earthquakes?
First of all, how many people has nuclear taken out, even including Chernobyl? According to the WHO and the IAEA, Chernobyl was (or rather, will be) responsible for about 9000 deaths. This includes the people killed by acute radiation exposure and the expected number of people killed by premature cancer from sub-acute radiation exposure over a period of 20 years. This comes out to 450 deaths per year.
By comparison, the Bhopal disaster killed approximately 3000 people immediately, and 8000 people in total from gas-related injuries. It's not at all clear to me that nuclear is more dangerous than other "everyday" technologies like chemical plants and oil refineries.
As for the effects of radioactive contamination, well, chemical contamination can be just as long-lived. Just look at your average Superfund site.
There's nothing special about the risks of nuclear energy. We tolerate the exact same risks with many of our current technologies. It's just irrational fear tied to the anti-nuclear weapons movement that's driving the freeze on new nuclear construction.
> We've had clean, green, safe, carbon-neutral energy for nearly 60 years.
And whether the original design used for those failed facilities was created today or 60 years ago is irrelevant if today, right now, they can cause dirty hazardous life-threatening disasters. Which again, clearly and directly disproves your claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power...
Yes, all systems fail. Fukushima was hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a 10m tsunami, which is about the worst environment imaginable and it almost survived intact. Most newer technologies would have been unaffected, or at least shut down into a safe state.
And yes, you can come up with nightmare scenarios for every technology. Fukushima experienced one in a dilapidated state and just about came through unscathed. Add in another 30 or 40 years of science and engineering and the chances of a nuclear disaster effectively become zero.
Compared with the pollution and deaths associated with coal, I know which side I'd rather be on.
Edit: OK, only now read the Wikipedia link. So your point is that Fukushima was not operated properly? Well that is exactly my point. Even if in theory you could design a secure system, it won't work out in reality. "The system" is not only one reactor, it is the whole system of society that operates it.
Just look at the way the US handles airport security after 9/11 and after the shoe bomber and underwear bomber (naked body scanners). The same way they will handle nuclear power plant security. If there is a problem, they will fix that particular problem and totally miss the big picture. (And every country also, just mentioning the US because their airport failure is so well known these days).
And another Edit: if they knew Fukushima was not safe before the accident, why did they not shut it down? Think about it, and then extrapolate to other nuclear plants.
And how did they sell Fukushima to the public when it was built? I am sure they claimed it was safe at least back then.
Chernobyl: Horrible Soviet-era reactor design that was never approved in the West.
No member of the general public or plant worker has ever been killed by a Western-designed power reactor. That's a better safety record than any other source of power. We've got 60 years of experience. There have been three major accidents, two of which produced no loss of life whatsoever.
Installers fall from roofs quite often...
This is an overstatement. A crane at Fukushima fell down killing a few people, and a couple of workers died of heatstroke (due in part to radiation suits).
As for Chernobyl, you forgot to mention that in addition to design flaws, they were performing a scientific experiment well outside the safety parameters at the time of the disaster.
The Fukushima Daiichi power plants used a half-century old design which was already scheduled for decommissioning and that was subjected to one of the most powerful natural disasters in all of human history.
Even so, nuclear power has yet to cause as many deaths as Hydro power or coal.
We can build better, safer reactors. We already do. The surest way to make sure we continue operating the least safe reactors is to put unnecessary roadblocks in the way of building new ones.
We really only have two choices: cut back energy consumption (willingly or not) or explore modern nuclear power options.
Fifteen thousand people died in the Japan earthquakes with not a single death due to the Fukushima meltdown. Yet when one asks the average American about it, all he remembers is how horrible Fukushima was. (It's mind boggling to me.)
It is interesting that so much fear is focused at nuclear power. There must be a combination of the association with nuclear weapons, fear of hard to understand things, and possibility for rare but severe accidents.
yet
So it is possible several people may face an earlier death than they would have if Fukoshima did not occur. But when talking deaths we are still short by 3 to 4 orders of magnitudes to the direct deaths from the earthquake.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/iaea/radiological-briefing-11-0505 [2] http://xkcd.com/radiation/
I take it you wouldn't mind moving into those evacuated areas around Fukushima. Housing is probably really cheap there right now.
Cellulosic/Algae Ethanol: About an order of magnitude off on cost, many orders away on capacity. They are still immature technologies but seem to have a lot of promise.
Photovoltaic Solar: Cost is almost there, but no one has a plan for what to do when the sun isn't shining. Solar systems can only produce energy for about 6 hours a day, which presents a problem when we need energy for 24 hours. It doesn't produce energy during peak demand (~5-9pm) to even help with load balancing. People can currently make a small profit selling back to the grid, but there's virtually no chance of it providing more than about 5% of demand.
Solar Thermal Collectors: Better than photovoltaic as they can generally produce power for about 8 hours, then molten salt batteries can provide energy for another couple; but still not a viable large scale solution.
Wind: Geographically limited, very high maintenance costs.
Hydrogen: Only an energy storage medium, not a means to produce energy. In most cases there are more efficient ways to use the energy directly without the additional loss of producing hydrogen.
Corn Ethanol: Energy storage medium, and a bad one. The most optimistic numbers I've found indicate it requires about .84 gallons of gasoline to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. Most numbers are significantly worse, in the 1.2-1.4 range. It sounds great if the lower numbers are accurate, but 1 gallon of ethanol contains ~2/3 the energy of 1 gallon of gasoline so it's still a net loss. (note: I haven't done any serious research on sugarcane ethanol, which at first glance appears somewhat better)
Hydroelectic: Great technology that is proven, cost effective, and viable; but is severely limited geographically and the dams can cause major environmental concerns.
After years of following the news, studying it, and taking classes in renewable energy; it always comes back to nuclear. If it wasn't for legislative bungling, lawsuits preventing new plants, and the occasional (comparatively) minor failure of 40 year old technology we wouldn't even be talking about a clean energy problem. I'd love for one of these technologies to prove me wrong but there is little indication they will in the near future.
Looking at US numbers only, we would need to figure a way to store 51.69 TWh and supply over an 18 hour period. They are storing 233 MWh and distributing over 5 minutes.
For a pumping station, that works out to 379.4 cubic kilometers of water lifted 50 meters in the air. For comparison, that is 20 times the volume of the Great Salt Lake. About the volume of Lake Erie once inefficiencies are factored in.
I also ran the numbers a while back in a renewable energy class for lead acid batteries. That would require something like the entire lead production of the world for several years, just to handle the US.
This is kinda like referring to a project in Texas as Mexican.
There's a lot of cool ideas out there, but the tech needs time & research. Classic example is wave power. It gets talked up like crazy; yet many wave power demos produce less than 1W. Yes, I see that you can harvest energy from the ocean- now tell me how that thing is going to power an entire city.
If the elites really cared about solving climate change, they would advance honest, technology-neutral policy solutions like a simple tax on carbon production. Instead, from battery cars to ethanol, Green Tech has been an excuse for a multi-billion dollar money grab.
If you want to complain about our government "wasting" money and trillion dollar money grabs look no further then the Department of Defense: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/13/opinion/13opcha... (note the numbers in this graph are in billions, not millions)
Solyndra was a rounding error in what the US Government wastes on defense.
VCs are like the government, they only win when companies win. Just like the government VCs loose many, but win big on a few. Government wins when the companies they "invest" in create American jobs. I am not even going to go into you putting "simple" and "tax" next to each other in the same sentence.
The fact that DoD is a bigger waste of money is not a defense of Clean Tech.
The real solution is getting the big incentives correct-- tax pollution, and get the government out of the business of picking technology and playing venture capitalist.
Solar is booming and doing much better than in the 1970's, and there have been many breakthroughs combined to helping getting the cost per watt way down.
> And the batteries are hazardous.
You do know gas and oil are hazardous and toxic right? You do know that the extraction, processing and consumption of oil and it's byproducts are putting very large amounts of bad stuff into the air we breathe and water we drink, right? You did hear about the various huge oil spills, including the BP Gulf disaster, Nigeria, etc?
The whole point of government, one of many, is is to act as a neutral guardian for society's shared resources and common benefits. Individuals and businesses are relatively free to pursue their own interests, but only so far as it does not harm others (ideally), or bring about Tragedy of the Commons kinds of situations. Thus, some regulation, and some punishment/reward mechanisms are in place to help maintain or bring about the kind of world we want to live in. This should be pretty clear, and has no malevolent intent.
I do find it funny that some folks never complained that Big Oil was getting subsidies, incentives, breaks, special treatment, etc. but when it comes to solar, wind, anything intended to be a cleaner or renewable energy source, suddenly there are complaints that government is distorting the market place or picking winners. The difference, clearly, is which technology or industry one would personally rather see favored. Put me down for favoring energy sources that are renewable or better for health. This should not be some kind of radical position, because the benefits are pretty clear.
We agree that taxing pollution is probably a good thing for government to be doing. But the oil/coal industries world-wide are fighting such things, and they spend lots of money on Congress. And the Republican Party, in particular, does their bidding almost every time a relevant bill comes along.
Solyndra was not basic research.
But I agree with you about the carbon tax.
This, they explain, will have the effect of making oil cheap to the point that there won’t be enough money to invest in maintaining the current infrastructure and even less to invest in green tech. Once the bad debts are cleared and growth returns the true effects of peak oil will be felt everywhere.
In summary, they say, don’t get your hopes up with clean/green tech. It is too little too late and it simply cannot replace oil. And nuclear energy is no better once you take into account the energy required to build, operate and decommission reactors and also dispose of radioactive waste in a safe manner.
They have in my opinion one of the best analysis available in the intertubes.