My colleague Gary Tulie sent me this piece, suggesting a way to prevent the constant whip-sawing of incentives for renewable energy. Hi Craig, this looks like an interesting idea.
Yes, this is very interesting indeed. There is no doubt that the world needs a stable and predictable environment in which to make investment into cleantech, and this seems as sane as anything I’ve come across.
My colleague Gary Tulie wrote a great comment on my recent post on solar thermal, in which he explains the opportunities for improvement in efficiencies for these technologies. Here’s something I would add:
I’m betting against tower CSP (shown here) as a long-term scalable approach, as the mirrors located at various distances from the tower need to be fabricated in different shapes, and the tracking mechanisms, of which there are thousands, need to be extremely precise. All this represents huge complexity and cost. Abengoa, the world leader in CSP, which I mentioned in my post, relies on a proprietary design in parabolic trough, which is far simpler. The challenge, of course, is temperature; for the reason Gary mentioned, i.e., the Carnot limit, high temperatures are required for decent efficiencies.
Every day, a surprising number of people waste their time—and their gasoline—looking for parking. The vehicles looking for parking are an important part of the total traffic in the inner-city environment—as much as 22%.
Especially in large cities, drivers adopt a particular system to find a parking spot: the most common method is to look for parking near the destination, then going to expand the search to find a free parking lot closest to the destination. This research method causes the consumption of large quantities of fuel and also means that the streets are clogged with vehicles looking for spots. (more…)
(At first, I thought this guest post was a joke, or perhaps merely a submission to see whether or not I’m paying attention. The bottom line: if adding a turbocharger to a Porsche makes it “greener” in any sense at all, it does so in an extremely bizarre use of the word. In any case, here it is. -ed)
Porsche has recently mentioned that their newest 911 model has a turbocharged engine. The sports car was conceived to meet challenging CO2 emission rules and demanding fuel economy. (more…)
My friend I mentioned earlier writes:
I had the plant construction cost at $600 million per square mile. I figured a few hundred billion more for infrastructure improvements like HVDC grid upgrades and storage. It seems the nationwide CSP solution is far less feasible that I understood. (more…)
A friend asks: By your lights, has anything changed substantively – positively or negatively – with regard to the viability and cost of CSP, molten salt energy storage, and HVDC? Are we still fully capable of satisfying the entire US electricity demand with 10,000 square miles at about $6 trillion?
The LCOE (levelized cost of energy) of PV is about $0.05, wind is $0.03 in the right places, and CSP about $0.14. (more…)
My mother is a right-wing Republican, but one with a wonderful and kind nature—so generous, in fact, that she puts up with my occasional jokes about politics, and my kidding-on-the-level reminders that her party seems to be out of sync with the psyche of the American people. And here, to make my point is Bernie Sanders’ Twitter feed during the course of the debate the other night. (more…)
2GreenEnergy supporter Cameron Atwood sent me this masterpiece from Jedediah Purdy (pictured), Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where he teaches constitutional and environmental law; it begins: “In the last week, a group of scientists and a prominent historian each predicted a climate apocalypse.” Our conversation:
Craig: Holy (cow), that’s amazing. What an article.
Cameron: Isn’t it? The last line is especially brilliant: “That 150 years is also less than a blink in the eye of planetary time. And that eye is now a human one, looking back at us from a future that only we will make.” It’s so completely necessary that more people think like this.
Craig: Yes, that line is breath-taking; it is an extraordinary piece of writing from start to finish, really. And your assessment is spot-on, IMO. I’ll write a post on it in the hopes that our readers will check it out.
2GreenEnergy Supporter Cameron Atwood sent me this piece on OTEC, and writes: Interesting.
Yes, that IS interesting. There definitely will be unintended consequences (assuming that OTEC ever comes along). Some of these, however, will be good, or at least have the potential to be so—as I wrote in the post linked above. (more…)
Today, most of the literate world is aware of the challenge that our civilization faces with respect to “AGW” (anthropogenic global warming, aka climate change, aka climate disruption). For most of us, however, this realization has come fairly recently; public recognition of the issue has come a very long way in just the last 10 years. The science underlying all this, however, has been a long time in the making.
The concept of CO2 as a greenhouse gas goes back to the 19th Century. Then, per this article (other citations here and here, but the best one is here): (more…)
