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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Reader David Stout sent me this excellent article on the intelligent rebuilding of the New Jersey and New York seaboards after Hurricane Sandy.  It contains a great number of terrific points about applying common sense in re-establishing housing, commercial buildings, and infrastructure in regions that are vulnerable to storms and violent weather events that are expected to become increasingly frequent and severe.  Yes, we need redundant emergency solutions, and the half-dozen other solid ideas the author proposed.

But what we really need is a way to avert the impending catastrophe of climate change.  We don’t live in 19th Century Holland when a city was saved by a little boy’s finger in a dike.  We live in a world where the Greenland ice sheet, 660 thousand square miles, about 20% the size of the continental United States, is melting.  Building sea-walls around Lower Manhattan in not an adequate answer to preventing the damage this world is about to incur if we can’t come together and construct a global solution here.

I’m not saying that it will be easy, but I am saying that it will be required.

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I coached several years of my children’s participation in soccer and basketball, including my son Jake’s soccer team five years ago when he was 14, one of the highlights of my life, as it connected me with so many fine people, and, at the end of the day, a really good cause. In particular, one of the kids on the team, Joel Blacker, comes from a devout Christian family that does a ton of humanitarian work in Haiti.  Here’s a video he made on the subject a few years ago. 

During this soccer season, Joel’s father Jez and I became fine friends; in fact, we went on to co-coach a few other soccer teams on which Jake and Joel both played.  Tonight, my wife Becky and I went out to watch his band play a concert (he’s a singer in a rock and roll band) — a fund raiser for their efforts. More on what this is about is available here.

Joel is “not just anyone,” btw.  Here’s a short piece I wrote on coaching that I hope you’ll enjoy; Joel’s the one mentioned at the end.   

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Here’s a lecture by Ozzie Zehner, whose popular book “Green Illusions” is making the rounds.  Indeed, there is a great deal of truth here.  In particular, we’re seduced by the sexiness of renewable energy, and in some cases make extremely illogical decisions to deploy it.

Zehner provides an example of a gentleman who cut down two deciduous trees that had wonderful passive solar effects (providing shade in the summer, but letting the sun pass through in the winter) because he was so in love with the concepts of having solar panels on his roof.  Ozzie showed with great ease that the net effect to the environment was fiercely negative.  There is no doubt that we dote over solar, wind, etc., at the expense of energy efficiency and conservation solutions that are, in some cases, hundreds of times more effective in environmental benefits.  And if you think this can be asinine at the personal/private level, try to imagine what happens at a governmental scale.   (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Actor Robert (“Bob”) Picardo graduated in 1971 from the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, two years ahead of me.  We all knew he was a creative genius at the time; he had a winsome manner, a brilliant mind, and a stage presence so powerful and refined that it seemed hard for us to believe we were watching a teenager up there. 

On the home page of his website is a video in which Bob reads Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short essay about our beloved planet and its place among the stars.  If you can watch this and not be moved, you’re made of stronger stuff than I. 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

When you open a can of soda or beer, do you like to bend the tab back and forth until it breaks off in your fingers?  That phenomenon, fatigue, plays a big factor in the design and maintenance of wind turbines.  The more torque placed on a blade causing it to deform from perfect perpendicularity to the rotor shaft, and the more often that torque is placed, the more hardware you need to keep the blades from breaking in the course of the turbine’s lifetime.  And of course, more hardware = more cost.

Those with some level of training in math and science may be interested in this graph, which shows at a glance what I really like about the unique design offered by my client, The Wind Turbine Company.  The area under each curve represents the total amount of deformation.  See how much smaller that area is for the orange curve versus the black?  That’s the reason that this turbine represents a significant capital cost reduction, and a corresponding reduction in the cost of wind-generated electricity of 30-35% compared with today’s industry leaders.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Nuclear

On my post on the costs of nuclear energy, frequent commenter Larry Lemmert writes:

Nuclear may go away for the next 50 years or so, not because of renewables beating them on price but because gas from fracking has become dirt cheap.

In the words of Yogi Berra, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”  Having said that, let me ask you to take a trip forward in time, into the most likely set of future circumstances that constitute our world in the year 2062.  

Is it possible that some form of nuclear energy will have broken through between now and then?  Sure. It could be based on another large, fissionable atom like thorium.  It could also be some form of fusion. But isn’t it far more likely that, given that the Earth receives 6000 times more  power from our sun than the whole energy-starved world consumes, that renewable energy (essentially, some form of solar) will win the day, if we still have a civilization in place at that point?

I’ll be 107 in 2062, and, though I plan to be healthy as a horse from my exemplary clean living :), it’s meaningless to make a bet with you on the subject. I wish that weren’t the case. I’d love to plunk down a wager. 

In any case, thanks for hanging around here, Larry.  I always appreciate your insights.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Nuclear

Larry Lemmert, astute as always, wrote a terrific comment here, to the effect that our assessments of the dangers of nuclear energy are unfounded, and the math we attempt to apply here unfair.

I think it’s true that there is a kind of mass hysteria about nuclear, which, given the statistics to date, is unfair.  It’s also true that new designs in nuclear facilities make them far safer than they were 40 years ago.  However, I’m worried about waste disposal, and I’m also worried about costs.  The latter is the reason that I think it’s essentially over for nuclear.  Obviously, if a practical breakthrough in thorium comes along, I’ll be (most happily) eating these words.  But for now, the cost of renewables is falling steadily; the cost of nuclear is going the other way.  

As we’re seeing with natural gas and the buzz about shale oil, cost/price is the 600-pound gorilla, as there is no political will to price in the externalities of energy generation.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Here’s an article about Germany, and the incredible work they’ve done to replace their fossil fuel-based energy consumption with renewables.   There, the clean energy movement, Energiewende, (“energy transformation”) estimates that at least 80 percent, perhaps 100%, of Germany’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2050.

So, are Germans leftists who don’t understand math?  I was a BMW driver most of my life; I don’t think so.  But, as Europeans, they tend to see the world through a completely different lens than Americans.  They don’t put stock in arguments from TV weathermen and pastry chefs who deny climate change, and they, as one of the most prosperous countries on the planet, don’t argue that clean energy would kill their economy, since their experience has demonstrated the precise opposite. 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

Readers may want to check out Christopher Willis’ excellent comment on my post yesterday on nuclear and solar energy, in which he points out that a complete replacement for the energy Americans consume would require enough solar PV to cover the entire state of South Carolina. 

I’ve always argued (though it’s the ultimate moot point, because we’re not doing it anyway) that the acreage really isn’t the gating issue.  If there weren’t other concerns, I’m sure, if I could provide enough education on the subject, I could get the average American to vote for a distributed set of solar arrays totaling the size of the state of SC scattered around the southwestern desert in exchange for the end of ecologic, health, and national security concerns associated with fossil fuels, and the fear surrounding nuclear. The real issues are the costs of installation, storage, and transmission.  

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Nuclear

Rick Maltese is a bright, thoughtful guy, and makes some very solid statements on behalf of nuclear energy.  He writes:

Statistically safety for nuclear power in the US does better than renewables, mind you it is only marginally. You may have noticed my blog before. The reason for the name “Deregulate the Atom” is to raise awareness about how a great technology has been prevented from maturing because of the over regulating authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the fossil industries campaign against their best competitor. I see the 3rd and 4th generation reactors as a huge improvement over the designs that were built 40 years ago and are still running. China will lead the way with the most number of new reactor designs.

My other pronuclear blog is http://thoriummsr.com which is supportive of molten salt reactor technology which is the safest design for a nuclear reactor possible.

Thanks for your posts against fossil fuels. They are well thought out and provide me with some ideas too. Best of luck.

Thanks, Rick.  I’m not rabidly anti-nuke, though I do reiterate my concerns about waste disposal and cost.  

Also, as I’ve written before, I’m not positive that deregulation is what you really want when it comes to something with the potential consequences of nuclear energy.  Greedy coal companies cut corners, mines collapse, miners get sick, the coal companies cover it up, a few people go to jail, blah-blah-blah.  That’s tragic, but I’m not sure I want to see this played out on a nuclear stage.  

As far as I’m concerned, the most credible solution for a planet at this stage of technological evolution, 93 million miles from its star, a star that provides our Earth with 6000 times more power than we need, is to find a way to tap into that energy stream.  Here’s the poignant part: if it weren’t for the power of the almighty dollar, the fossil fuel monopolists wouldn’t have the stranglehold they maintain over our political discourse, and we would already have clean energy in the bag.

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