Renewable Energy and Nature
If you want to read a thoroughly misleading piece of garbage, let me suggest this article on renewable energy and nature, published in the EnergyCollective. Check this out:
“The renewable energy paradigm requires an unprecedented industrial re-engineering of the landscape: lining every horizon with forty-story wind turbines, paving deserts with concentrating solar mirrors, girdling the coasts with tidal and wave generators, and drilling for geological heat reservoirs; it sees all of nature as an integrated machine for producing energy…… Ultimately, if we want to save more nature we must leave more of it alone, not harness it to power a human population of 7 going on 9 billion.”
Please, no more. I just had lunch, and that is really nauseating. At the risk of stating the obvious:
• In terms of the land-mass required to replace every Watt of power in North America generated by all sources, we need to cover the fraction 1/936 (about one-tenth of 1%) with solar or wind.
• Making this happen on a worldwide scale would halt the destruction of human health and our ecosystems that is occurring with ever-increasing intensity, due to our dependence on fossil fuels.
• Our current approach to energy here on Earth is hardly equivalent to “leaving nature alone.”
I think I’ll just try to shake this one off and get back to work.
Or we could increase our efficiency and stop wasting 85% of the energy we produce and we would only need a small fraction of the stuff he is talking about to satisfy our actual usage needs. Efficiency is always cheaper and generally easier.
LOL!,
That article is more funny than threatening.
But you are exaggerating quite a bit yourself Craig.
In order to generate the total electricity consumed by America, we’d need ~130,000 square miles of wind farms. That’s not nothing, that’s ~3.6% of the U.S. land mass…, and that doesn’t even account for the needs of heating and transportation fuel synthesis. And that’s for America – a nation that is a net importer of manufactured goods (we export a bulk of our energy demand) and has 1/4 – 1/10th the population density of Europe, China, SE Asia, Japan, and Korea… with the failing nations often having far worse population density still (Bangladesh – the most hopeless country in the world – has a population density of >1100 people/km2!, ~30X our population density, and they are facing rising seas that will drown half of their land area in the next century!)
The fact that 99% of the land dedicated to wind power would be able to be used for multiple purposes is a different issue… there would indeed need to be a lot of wind towers… There would also need to be quite a few solar panels, which could easily be put on top of buildings and used in other ways that would allow multiple-usage of the same plot of land.
But we are talking about really big things when we talk about transforming the world to a renewable paradigm. That should be respected, and appreciated… and embraced.
🙂
You’re right; I shouldn’t have conflated the land use for solar and wind; I believe my calcs are right for PV or CSP — or anything whose efficiencies are in the teens and capacity factors are in the 20s. Correct?
Craig,
I just took an existing wind farm in a low class-5 wind zone and extrapolated… Of course, in the current existing wind farm, the towers are oriented in such a way as to maximize wind per tower – rather than maximizing wind towers per land mass, so it won’t work out in a logical fashion based on theoretically possible wind yields, rather it would reflect an honest attempt to get highest economic yield regardless of land use (which is what will always happen).
For solar, it’s a little different because PV solar panels truly cover the area that they harvest energy from, while CSP heliostats are spaced so as to minimize shading even as they encorporate tracking.. Then you have to determine whether you assume tracking with the PV panels, etc… It’s horribly uncertain. So the easiest way to think about it is this: The 10-year average insolation of the continental U.S. is 4.056 kWh/m2/d. If you assume cheap thin-film PV cells without tracking just blanketing an area (~10% efficiency), then it would take ~10,400 square miles – or about 0.27% of the American land mass. Note the difference here is that the wind discussion just assumed strategic placement of wind turbines in an extremely widely spaced manner, while the solar is only taking into consideration the amount of space taken by the actual panels
Either way, it’s a lot – and that’s a pretty awesome. It would take blillions of man-hours to make such a thing happen, and that would be a legacy that future generations would look back upon in awe and respect. We as a nation used to strive for great things – we carved a mountain just to give respect to 4 great presidents, we dammed great rivers in undertakings that were considered phenomenal in their day, we blasted a waterway across the Isthmus of Panama, we dug canals connecting the Great Lakes and the Great Mississippi, we connected both coasts with rails, we sent people to the moon – just to show off!
Now we recoil in horror because the idea of dispatch switching to a more renewable energy paradigm might be a big project. That was my problem with the article in question… China is completing the South North Water Diversion Project – an engineering project that is on a scale that makes the Three Gorges Dam look like a high-school science fair project (this is not much of an exaggeration)… And some spineless crybaby on “the energy collective” is whining about the fact that it would take a lot of work to put up a lot of wind towers and solar panels…
It’s AWESOME when we do something that is truly profound. When did we start running away from that?
😉
The answer to your last question, I believe, is this: We started running away from doing something truly profound when that profundity began to threaten the most powerful corporate interest (fossil energy) that this planet has ever known.
And again Glenn, are you basing your numbers on what is currently generated or what actually gets used at the endpoint and not wasted on the destination to the end or by inefficiencies? The numbers I cited above came from a study on industrial energy usage. I would propose that the waste in domiciles would be similar as people tend to be lazy and negligent about turning things off when they are not being used or have heating and cooling leaks. We also know that vehicles generally are not terribly efficient. I would propose that we don’t need near the generating capacity that we have today to do the actual work that we need done by energy. Rooftop solar as you talk about, when used locally, also does not have the same inefficiencies as grid power coming from a distant generating station.
Brian,
Yes, I was just doing a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation assuming 4 PWh/year of electricity consumption. Your stat of 85% of our energy being wasted includes the inefficiencies of electricity generation – which don’t logically compare to renewable options (no value is placed on the “lost” or “wasted” energy in the more inefficient renewable generation).
The thing is, our end-use electric consumption is likely never going to decrease. We’ve more or less stopped the rapid increase in our nation’s energy consumption through improvements in efficiency, but every time someone better insulates their house, or switches from an incandescent light bulbs to CFL’s (or still rarely LED’s), someone else upgrades their TV to a 90″ plasma monster TV, or just moves to a McMansion. Homes are getting bigger, TV’s are getting bigger. Stereos are getting louder with purer sound, and the population is still growing. Eventually, the low-hanging fruit gains from switching light bulbs and better insulation will be exhausted, and the electricity demand will grow. This will be especially true in the distant future when people begin switching their home heating to electricity, or their transportation to electricity… As manufacturing starts growing in this country our electricity demand will increase significantly, and as renewable energy penetration increases there will be a greater need for inefficient storage cycling, which will serve to increase demand and will reverse the trend towards a more efficient grid.
FWIW, I’m more bullish on efficiency increase than I am any single renewable energy platform, but efficiency will only get us so far.
😉
OK Glenn, back of the napkin with current numbers works for me. I agree consumption will probably never decrease and efficiency will only get us so far. I am pretty much up against that wall right now. I don’t think there is very much more I can do to this house to increase it’s efficiency and I am now in the increase in generation and storage phase.